NDN Experimental Evaluation in Multi-Domain Tactical Environments

The characteristics of tactical network environments pose a severe challenge to information sharing. In particular, the Distributed, Intermittent, and Limited (DIL) nature of these networks require specifically designed communication protocols capable of efficiently exploiting the scarce network resources to offer reliable communication. While IP-based protocols have been widely adopted in this context, implementations of the Information Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm represent promising novel approaches to tactical networks thanks to their natural support for in-network caching and their information-oriented architecture. In particular, the Named-Data Networking (NDN) design injects novel ideas to manage channel heterogeneity and multi-homed nodes, while providing easy and enabling cache-and-forwarding mechanisms as well as other mechanisms to tailor its behaviour to a variety of different network environments. With this paper we extend our previous coarse-grained evaluation of NDN within tactical edge networks conducted within the NATO group IST-161 RTG by introducing a more sophisticated network environment and defining two ad-hoc mechanisms to improve the protocol effectiveness and our test harness.