Evaluating the Scalability of Group Communication Protocols over Synchronized Cooperative Broadcast

Military operations in Tactical Edge Networks, usually comprised of dismounted soldiers and mobile vehicles, often have to exchange data that is received by multiple nodes in the network with one example being blue force data. Group communications protocols offer an efficient mechanism to handle such dissemination. In this paper, we examine the performance and scalability of a variety of group communications protocols over the Anglova scenario with network sizes ranging from 24 to 96 nodes. In particular, we use the Synchronized Cooperative Broadcast (SCB) radio model, as it is particularly well-suited to such communications. We report on results using the three measures of Delivery Ratio, Latency, and Bandwidth Utilization. The results show that most of the group communications protocols achieve good scalability results.