Creating a cost-effective air-to-ground network simulation environment

Today's warfighter is increasingly dependent on networked systems and information from unmanned aerial vehicles to provide up-to-the-minute conditions on the battlefield; therefore the network must continually perform at optimum levels. One of the problems encountered in complex air-to-ground networks is that all possible hardware, software and network configurations that will be encountered in the field cannot be pretested; therefore there is a need to provide a method for studying the interaction among diverse hardware and software components and identifying potential network bottlenecks in air-to-ground networks and their causes before they become critical. In this paper, we demonstrate our accomplishments in building a robust and scalable simulation of an air-to-ground network environment based on wired and wireless network emulation using widely available software tools. We will also present our design for data capture and evaluation that support hypothetical, what-if scenarios for testing network performance bottlenecks.