A Content Driven Routing Protocol of the Software-defined Information-Centric Airborne Tactical Network

The traditional airborne tactical network (ATN) is tightly coupled to combat applications and does not take into account the information content itself, the routing protocols of current ATNs cannot provide differentiated communication services for different information content, leading to the difficulty of meeting the communication requirements of the diverse operational platforms and various operational missions of the aviation swarm. This paper integrates the concept of software-defined networking (SDN) and the concept of information-centric networking (ICN) into the ATN, and proposes the software-defined information-centric airborne tactical network (SDIC-ATN) architecture. Based on the proposed architecture, a content-driven routing protocol is further designed to provide efficient and coping transmission services for different information content.