Tactical Network Bandwidth Analysis: Application of the Wearables Model-Based Systems Engineering - System Architecture (MBSE-SA)

Abstract

Warfighters are often exposed to harsh environmental conditions, and experience high rates of physical and cognitive stress, fatigue, and infections, resulting in the degradation of their health and physical performance. This degradation can have a profound effect on the readiness of military forces. Wearable sensor systems can be used to monitor warfighter physiological and cognitive data, providing insight into their health status during routine military training and deployed operations; however, to enable a real-time, tactical health and performance monitoring capability, wearable sensor systems must integrate into existing tactical military information networks without compromising network function. We extended our existing Wearables Model-Based System Engineering – System Architecture (MBSE-SA) to include a bandwidth simulation to analyze the effects wearable sensor systems have on overall network function specifically for military use cases. Our Wearables MBSE-SA enabled us to model many notional and existing architectures, which represent the wide range of wearable sensor devices, communication protocols, end user devices, and tactical network nodes typically present in operational environments. By taking advantage of the existing Wearables MBSE-SA framework and architectures, the resulting bandwidth simulation rapidly assessed several existing military network architectures for wearable sensor system integration and identified where network changes were required. Validating the flexibility of the Wearables MBSE-SA to incorporate new analyses was critical for the military's ability to explore wearable sensor system trades and evaluate architectures in the quickly changing wearable systems technology domain.