Slice Aware Framework for Intelligent and Reconfigurable Battlefield Networks
Anthony Castañares, Deepak K. Tosh, Charles Kamhoua · MILCOM 2021 - 2021 IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM) · 2021
Modern day tactical battlefield networks are typically not designed specific to the operational mission they support. These tactical networks are usually large, flat, non-segmented, absent of a robust cybersecurity response process, and overloaded with heterogeneous systems with various bandwidth and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. These conditions create poor battlefield network performance and introduce significant risk to commanders and their Warfighters. To address these deficiencies we have designed a framework that uses network slicing to address many of the cybersecurity and performance issues unique to modern day tactical battlefield networks. Novel communication technology in 5G networking has the potential to be adapted to work with existing and next-generation tactical radio technologies to create network slices that provide high security, strong segmentation, and guaranteed quality of service performance in both intra and inter-slice communication. Our novel framework contains three components: 1) An intelligent network slice controller that dynamically manages the creation, management, security, and topology of tactical battlefield network slices; 2) a decision making system that continuously analyzes the battlefield network and suggest dynamic reconfiguration based upon network changes, threats, losses, or mission modifications, adjustments, or pivots; and 3) a network slice broker and orchestrator that implements the slice reconfiguration in real-time when it is necessary. In addition to the framework described in this paper, the applicability and contributions to Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) are presented as well as potential challenges in our future work.