Dynamics of network connectivity in tactical MANETs

In the future battlefields, communication between commanders and soldiers will be a decisive factor to complete an assigned mission. In such military tactical scenarios, network topology is constrained by the dynamics of dismounted soldiers in the battlefield. In the battlefield area, soldiers may be divided into a number of squads and fire teams with each one having its own mission, especially in some critical situation (e.g., a military response to an enemy attack or a sweep operation of houses). This situation may cause an unpredictable behavior in terms of wireless network topology state, thus increasing the susceptibility of network topology to decomposition in multiple components. This paper presents a Group Mobility Model simulating realistic battlefield behaviors and movement techniques. We also analyze wireless communication between dismounted soldiers and their squad leader deployed in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) under different packet sending rate and perturbation factor modeled as a standard deviation parameter which may affect soldiers' mobility. A discussion of results follows, using several performance metrics according to network behavior (such as throughput, relaying rate of unrelated packets and path length).