Programmable control plane for mission critical wireless networks

Abstract

© 2017, © The Author(s) 2017. The control plane is an essential element to manage the data plane communications in wired and wireless networks. In a traditional network architecture, the control plane is embedded in the hardware and it lacks programmability. Military wireless networks are historically heterogeneous in nature and require complicated manual setups to create interoperability because of a discontinuous control plane. In the present work, we describe a simple programmable control plane model along with associated network abstractions to create a unified control plane interface that can communicate across heterogeneous wireless networks. We chose an ns-3 based network simulation engine to create, test, and validate the functional fidelity of our models. In addition to the network objects and interfaces available in ns-3, we modified ns-3 codes to capture the characteristics of our proposed model. Furthermore, we proposed a tractable mathematical framework to optimize the performance of the proposed control plane model.

Publication
Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation