Network performance impact of access control policies in Tactical Wireless Networks
William M. S. Stout, Rusty O. Baldwin · 2012
Tactical Wireless Networks (TWN) are a cornerstone of military communications in deployed environments. In TWNs bandwidth and network resources are extremely limited; efficient security mechanisms must be considered as networks become exposed to multinational access, influence and composition as well as increasingly complex security protocols. The communication burden of the WSN Authorization Specification Language (WASL) access control policies on an Enhanced Position Location Reporting Service network is analyzed for three needlines: Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA), Dynamically Allocated Permanent Virtual Circuits (DAP), and Multiple Source Group (MSG). Results determined that CSMA needlines quickly exhausted resources as nodes vied for transmission time; shorter delay times were experienced but suffered greater packet losses. The DAP needlines generally performed very well. The virtual circuits allowed data to be transmitted reliably resulting in a high completion rate with moderate to extreme delay times depending on resource contention. In small networks or networks with few sources, multiple MSG shares could be used to increase guaranteed bandwidth. The traffic model applied to the MSG network was well suited for this and had high completion rates for messages. However, as the number available of shares dwindled, delay and communication loss increased dramatically.