Towards analysis of IP communication in a constrained environment of tactical radio networks

The trend of unifying communication by deploying TCP/IP also influenced the domain of tactical networks. Commonly used narrowband waveform tactical radios offer only the low bandwidth data transfer. Because of very restricted resources available in these systems running the unmodified TCP/IP protocol stack is problematic if not impossible. This paper presents a simulation-based approach to a systematic analysis of TCP/IP communication in the narrowband tactical radio networks. The aim is to provide a framework able to analysis the source of problems that avoid deploying TCP/IP in tactical radio communication. The proposed method is demonstrated by providing an analysis of a few Internet protocols and evaluation of the suggested simple improvement to address resolution protocol that reduces the number of the required broadcast messages.