Analysis of Time-Sensitive MANET Channel Allocation in Contested Environments

Tactical military forces are increasingly using mobile ad-hoc network radios to connect highly mobile units operating on rugged terrain over long distances. These radios offer high data rates and automatic traffic relay, but they are susceptible to jamming from relatively simple devices. Thus, efficient electromagnetic spectrum use must consider the actions of adversaries seeking to deny full use of the spectrum. In previous work, we describe a constraint programming-based optimization method for efficiently allocating available radio channels in a contested environment using only locally-available information. We now build upon that work, analyzing the performance of the algorithm within various realistic combat scenarios with active jamming. Our analyses consider multiple jamming attacks and the relative desirability of candidate channel assignments. Unlike other agent-based methods which may require thousands of iterations to converge, our methods quickly obtain good solutions in very short run times. In all cases, we use realistic data sets developed from a large U.S. Marine Corps combat scenario, and we use high-fidelity models to simulate radio propagation over terrain.