On the Impact of Sources Criticality Correlation in Satellite-Based Tactical Communications

The network-centric warfare concept pursues information superiority as the key strategic advantage. However, information can have a different strategic value depending on its criticality and, thus, communication systems should provide higher priority to critical data. In this paper, performance of different approaches to achieve such differentiation in TDMA satellite-based tactical communication systems are provided. More specifically, we will evaluate the impact of the correlation between the criticality level of information sources that are in proximity to each other. To this purpose, a Markovian model of the process modeling the criticality level dynamics of information sources belonging to the same group is defined and implemented in the ns-2 simulation environment. Simulation results demonstrate that the correlation between the criticality level of information sources in proximity to each other significantly impact the performance of the communication system.