Modeling the wireless network architecture of Land Warrior

The United States Army is designing and implementing a revolutionary advance in the combat power of individual infantrymen on the battlefield: Land Warrior. In Land Warrior, each soldier becomes a node in a wireless local area network (WLAN). In order to account for likely losses of line of site between soldiers, the On Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP) is used. The purpose of this research was to construct a simulation study to determine whether the communications architecture of Land Warrior was sufficiently scalable to use in large Army units. This paper describes the input analysis conducted to determine probability distributions used to generate message traffic. This paper also describes the development of the simulation model used to determine the scalability of the Land Warrior communications architecture.