Dynamic Activation of Reach-Back Resources for Future Force Brigade Combat Teams (BCT)

This paper describes a new iterative approach to optimizing scarce communication resources that achieve reliable connectivity with high throughput and performance. The procedure consists of iteration between two steps. A set of platforms are generated from a scenario that contains predefined waveform capabilities and programmatically generated gateways and regions. With this input, a set of nodes are activated. The resulting network is evaluated on the quality of its arrangement. Using a Shortest Path First (SPF) algorithm, connectivity is found for all platform pairs. The costs assigned to the individual links and end-to-end routes serve as weights in the performance functions. The network connectivity performance cost function evaluates the costs of all complete and incomplete routes in the network, determining how well connected the platforms are. The network traffic performance cost function calculates the resulting traffic load placed on each waveform. These derived values will dictate if any changes are needed in the network. Succeeding iterations activate the nodes, with knowledge of the previous activations. Aware of the needed improvement, the program selects nodes that will lessen the mean number of hops and reduce the congestion in whichever waveform is over burdened. This process continues until a low enough cost is generated, resulting in an optimized network.