Study and performance analysis of transport layer mechanisms applied in military radio environment

The need for reliable data communication performed in critical conditions and the respect of real-time constraints is an open issue in radio-military networks, where fixed and nomadic terminals communicate by means of tactical radio infrastructures. In this perspective the need for real-time constraints plays a fundamental role when the interested applications are remote control, radar traces acquisition and command/control message exchanging. In this paper, the difficulties of data transportation in wireless networks are considered by taking emphasis on the TCP-NewReno implementation that does not guarantee satisfying performance results in such environments. The whole investigation is addressed at designing and validating novel transmission mechanisms to be implemented at the transport layer, directly inherited from standard TCP transmission scheme. TCP-radio and TCP-radio-newRTO proposals are thus discussed and compared with TCP-Westwood+ and TCP-NewReno in order to highlight the necessity for an enhanced transport protocol for data communication performed in radio military environments, where the data transfer is heavily affected by hazardous conditions, such as scattering, shadowing and slow fading.All the tests have been performed through the employment of a network emulator tuned to the radio characteristics in terms of end-to-end delay, available bandwidth and channel modelling.