Early, Robust Validation and Verification of Network-Enabled systems for Tactical Environments

The tactical environment provides unique challenges in terms of communication links, connectivity, infrastructure, mobility, scalability, and distributed network services as well as tactical application services. For communication links there are concerns associated with limited bandwidth, asymmetrical and intermittent links, latency, jitter, and beyond line-of-sight issues. These issues provide complex problems for the development and deployment of solutions for tactical mobile ad hoc networks, as any solution must take discovery, routing, network management, scalability, and quality of service into consideration. This paper addresses a modeling framework that supports system context and user need definition through functional architecture validation and performance simulation in geo-specific databases. Specifically, it looks at how behavioral and performance simulations in such a framework can provide a method and vehicle for development and early validation of technologies to effectively address the needs of the warfighter and help to discover unique ways to solve the problems associated with the tactical environment