Designing an Implementable User-Oriented Objective Function for MANETs

Communication networks are usually managed with network-oriented objectives such as throughput and latency. However, in military networks, these objectives are inappropriate; instead, objectives should be oriented to the mission and network stakeholder perspectives. A satisfactory objective function must exhibit the following characteristics: (i) operationally meaningful, (ii) sufficiently flexible, (iii) easy to modify, and (iv) implementable and optimizable in practice. In this paper, we present an approach to designing an implementable, operationally meaningful objective function.