Airborne network evaluation: challenges and high fidelity emulation solution

ABSTRACTThe future airborne network (AN) is envisioned as an IP-based hierarchical network with heterogeneous nodes and waveforms. Due to its highly dynamic nature and bandwidth constraints, new AN technologies are needed to provide reliable network operations with similar levels of mission support as that in terrestrial networks. This paper identifies challenges in designing and evaluating AN technologies and also describes an on-going effort on developing a realistic wireless testing and performance evaluation framework for AN testing and evaluation. A set of use cases are presented to illustrate how the framework can be used to evaluate new architecture and protocols in AN environments.