2015 Asian Conference on Defence Technology (ACDT)

Tactical Wireless Networks:

A Survey for Issues and Challenges
Wichai Pawgasame, Komwut Wipusitwarakun
School of Information, Computer and Communication Technology
Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology, Thailand
wichai.p@dti.or.th
AbstractAs network centric warfare becoming the key concept in the modern military doctrine, tactical wireless networks
have been used extensively throughout military operations for
sharing crucial information among deployed units. Most tactical
wireless networks are operating in a hostile environment, in which
normal network operation cannot be easily achieved. In military
operations, tactical wireless networks have high demands for
robustness, responsiveness, reliability, availability and security.
These requires continuous development of new technologies in
order to cope with random behaviours of hostile environment.
However, the random behaviour of tactical wireless networks under hostile environment has not been fully understood. This paper
provides a survey on current issues, and research challenges in
tactical wireless networks due to hostile environment. Several
research gaps in performance, security, routing, and management
of tactical wireless networks that are needed to be improved, are
pointed out to pave the way for future research in this area. This
paper provides insight understanding about the issues and trends
for future development of tactical wireless networks.

I. I NTRODUCTION
Wireless communication via radio signal has been involved
in military operation since the World War I. Telegraph radios
were installed on ship and shore to provide wireless communication over long distance. A radio was carried on an
airplane to provide communication between a pilot and ground
headquarter. The reliability of the wireless communication at
that time was very low, which made it less attractive in military
operations. During World War II, wireless communication had
been evolved rapidly. Voice communication through wireless
channel became more reliable. Each deployed force must be
equipped with a portable radio to provide communication
between forces. The wireless technologies during that time
were based on analog signals and operate in point-to-point or
broadcasting manner. [1]
In the current stage of military wireless communication,
the technologies are based on digital technology. Current
wireless communication is not only capable of transmitting
voice but also capable of transmitting data. The demands for
data transmission over wireless channel have been increased,
since various information such as troops position and sensor
data is needed to be shared among military units to provide
situation awareness in the area without network infrastructure.
As a result, wireless networking has been integrated to the
system to provide sharing of information of deployed units.
Wire network is still existed along with wireless network
as a backbone network. Due to the nature of each military

978-1-4799-8168-7/15/$31.00 2015 IEEE

force, each force develops its own network with different

protocol and topology. This restriction prevent interoperability
of wireless networks among different forces.
The military operations are moving toward the concept of
Network-Centric Warfare (NCW), in which a network is a
source of crucial information for a mission. The power of
NCW is relied on the effective networking of each entity involved in the operation [2]. The networking of entities enables
sharing of information, which can be developed to share the
situation awareness in the battlefield. Due to the nature of
military operation, fast deployment of forces is required and
units equipped with wireless communication device are always
moved. Wireless networking is preferred over wire network.
Mobile nodes can communicate in ad-hoc manner to build up
a network. A network should be scalable when there is a node
joining or leaving the network. The future wireless network
must be globally operable without wired backbone network.
In addition, interoperable of heterogeneous wireless networks
will be needed in joint operation of different forces.
Tactical wireless network is a term used for the wireless network supporting military operation in the battlefront.
It contain special characteristics that cannot be found in
commercial wireless network. The key characteristic is that
tactical wireless network must be able to operate under hostile
environment. The hostile environment is the environment that
is unfriendly to network operation. The factors that define a
hostile environment include high mobility nature of military
force, interferences from surrounding, and hostile attacks by
enemies. These unfriendly factors cause a large magnitude
uncertainty in tactical wireless networks operating in hostile
environment.
This paper provides a brief survey on the issues and
researches on tactical wireless networks. Some research gaps
and challenges in the area of tactical wireless networks are also
discussed. Section II gives the brief summary about a tactical
wireless network in a hostile environment and key factors
defining a hostile environment. Section III discusses the issues
in a tactical wireless network due to a hostile environment.
Section IV provides the review on past and recent researches
related to a tactical wireless network. Then, Section V states
the research challenges in a tactical wireless network that may
become research opportunities in the future. Finally, the study
is concluded in Section VI.

Fig. 1. Hostile attacks in tactical wireless network.

II. TACTICAL W IRELESS N ETWORK IN H OSTILE

E NVIRONMENT
By the nature of a military operation, a fast deployment
of force and a flexible mobility are very desirable. Deploying
wireless network in the battlefield is more preferred than the
wire network, because it does not require infrastructure. Unlike
a commercial wireless network, a tactical wireless network is
operating under a hostile environment, where network condition is very unstable. Instability can interrupt communications
and some crucial information may be lost. The instability in
a tactical wireless network is greater than the instability in
a commercial wireless network due to a hostile environment.
In a hostile environment, the operation of a tactical wireless
network must face various hostile conditions; e.g. intermittent
interference and jamming. Instability in hostile environment is
caused by the following key factors [3][4].
A. High node mobility
In a battlefield, mobile nodes are moving randomly. The
limitation of wireless communication is that it can only
communicate with the nodes within its radio range. When a
node is moving beyond the radio range of other nodes, it loses
connection to the network. In the modern wireless networking,
mobile nodes are connected as an ad-hoc network. Hence, the
mobility of nodes directly affects the availability of communication paths between nodes. Dynamic movement of nodes can
cause instability in the availability of communication paths.
B. Intermittent Interferences
Interferences in hostile environment include signal interferences from multi-path propagation, noise, and nearby frequencies. Interferences degrade signal-to-interference-plus-noise

ratio (SINR), and hence packet may be lost if interferences

and noise are stronger than the signal. Interferences in hostile
environment are very intermittent due to terrain types and
dynamic movement of node. A tactical wireless network is
operating in various types of terrain; i.e. urban, forrest, hill,
and sea. These different terrains produce different interference
characteristics on a tactical wireless network. Because of
dynamic movement of military force and network operation of
nearby forces, the interference in a tactical wireless network
has an intermittence behaviour. This intermittent interference
causes instability in a tactical wireless network, which is hard
to control.
C. Hostile Attacks
The hostile attacks on tactical wireless network include
physical attacks and electronic attacks. A physical attack
may be an attack that directly cause physical damages on
a mobile node. As a result, a mobile node is not able to
communicate and disappeared from a network. There are many
types of electronic attacks and they are evolved as a network
technology growth. Electronic attacks may be a jamming that
directly attack on a radio signal. It may be attacks that cause
malfunction in network; i.e. denial of services or flooding.
A hostile node may forge as a regular node, and steal or
drop information flowing in a network. These attacks may
shut down mobile nodes from communication permanently
or temporarily, which cause instability in a tactical wireless
network.
An interrupted mobile node can be modelled as a disappeared node, in which it cannot send or receive any data during
the interruption. Figure 1 illustrates a disappeared node as a

circle with a dotted line and an intruder as a circle with a

dashed line. An intruder node may forge as a regular node in
a network, in which it can intercept or drop information in a
network as illustrated in figure 1.
III. I SSUES ON TACTICAL WIRELESS NETWORKS
Due to the large magnitude instability in hostile environment, tactical wireless networks encounter many problems.
A. Understanding the networks behaviours
Due to large uncertainty in hostile environment, the behaviours and outcomes of tactical wireless network is hard
to be explained and predicted. A suitable wireless network
model are needed for analysing and designing of a tactical
wireless network, in which it has large uncertainty due to many
factors. Random hostile attack is the key different. The suitable
model should be able to capture the impact of different kinds
of hostile attacks on the behaviours and outcomes of a tactical
wireless network.
B. Robustness
Robustness is the main concern for NCW. Robustness is
the ability to cope with unstable changes in a network. An
unstable network may encounter disruption and losing of
crucial information. Some military applications require realtime information sharing. For example, a hostile target caught
by airborne radar is needed to be reported in real time. Its
position and heading must be distributed and updated to nearby
friendly aircrafts and defence system in a blink of time in
order to quickly response to the threat. If the transmission
of target information cannot tolerate the disruption due to a
hostile environment, the defence system may loss track of the
hostile target.
C. Congestion
A tactical wireless network consists of hundreds of mobile
nodes connected in the same wireless channel. Typically,
there is a gateways that connects multiple tactical wireless
networks together, when information is needed to be shared
across networks. A congestion may occur when these mobile nodes try to access the same channel or communicate
across networks through the gateway. High probability of a
congestion occurs when networks are operating in a hostile
environment. Instability causes delay in packet transmission
and packets may arrive at a gateway at the same time causing
congestion at a gateway. Mobile nodes may be employed with
a retransmission technique. If unstable channel is detected, a
retransmission will be applied and a long delay may occur for
successive packets, which cause a congestion. The issue of
congestion in tactical wireless network is studied in [5], [6]
and [7].
D. Reliability
Reliability in network is the ability to deliver right information to the right place. An unstable network encounters
an unreliability in data delivery. Packets may be dropped or
corrupted due to instability of a network. This is caused by a

hostile environment. An intermittent interference may cause

packet losses. A hostile attack may try to drop or modify
packets flowing in a network. The issues of reliability also
include the delivery of information to the right place. That is
the route to the destination must be reliable. Instability due to
interference may corrupt a packet header and route a packet
into a wrong destination. Intruders may forge as a trusted node
and redirect a packet to a wrong destination. The issues related
to reliability are discussed in [8] and [9].
E. Availability
Availability is the ability of providing network services.
Instability due to hostile environment may cause link to be
broken and services will be disrupted. Dynamic movement
of a node may cause a transmitting node and a receiving
node to be out of radio coverage range. Hence, they cannot
provide services or communicate. An enemy may try to send
a jamming signal to attack a physical layer and a MAC layer
of a mobile node making a node unavailable for some periods
of time. An Intruder may try to occupy all links making them
unavailable to the nodes in the network.
F. Security
The issues of security are concerning with hostile attacks.
An enemy may forge into a network and tries to steal, drop,
or modify information in the network. This forged node leads
to the problem of reliability on information. Enemy may
flood the network by sending large amount of packets causing
congestion and availability problems in the network. Jamming
signal may disrupt communication in the network, which leads
to the issues of robustness and availability.
IV. RESEARCH INTERTERESTS ON TACTICAL
WIRELESS NETWORKS
According to the issues mentioned in Section II, research
interests in a tactical wireless network can be categorized into
wireless network model, performance, routing, security, and
management
A. Wireless Network Model
Wireless network model is an essential tool to analyze the
behaviours of a wireless network. A good model can lead
to the understanding of connectivity, coverage, capacity and
vulnerability of the network. There are many wireless network
models. Each model has its application based on a type of
network and an environment. Wireless network model contains
two part; A mobility model and A propagation model. A
mobility model describes a node movement in a vicinity of a
network and how it influences the connectivity, coverage, and
capacity of a network. A propagation model describes how a
wireless signal propagating in space under some constraints
such as interferences and attenuations.
Due to random nature of a hostile environment, a stochastic
model are more appropriated to describe a tactical wireless
network. Tyrakowski [10] proposed a random graph model
to describe random interferences in hostile environment. The

node movement modeled in [10] is described by a random

walk model. The result by Tyrakowski [10] shows that a
stochastic model is appropriated to model random interferences in a hostile environment. The work by Andrew and
Gantl [11] presents the intuitive idea of using a stochastic
geometry models to analyze networks capacity and coverage
area of a wireless network. The stochastic geometry model is
a mathematic model that model a node location and a network
structure as a random process, in which its impact to the
network connections are stochastic processes.
B. Performance
Researches related to a performance in a tactical wireless network have been dealing with robustness, congestion
control, and reliability issues. Performance is measured in
terms of throughput, delay, jitter, and packet error rate. The
performance of a tactical wireless network is very unstable due
to a hostile environment. Forward error correction code (FEC)
and Automatic Repeated Request (ARQ) is techniques that
attempt to counteract the packet loss due to unstable network.
These techniques are already implemented in a commercial
network such as internet. However, the requirements for a
tactical wireless networks are quite different.
Some military application requires real-time information
and ARQ may delay the delivery of information during poor
network condition. Grushevsky and Elmasry [9] propose an
adaptive Reed-Solomon Codes together with ARQ for message
delivery in tactical wireless network to improve speed of
service (SoS). The result Grushevsky and Elmasry [9] shows
that a packet encoded with adaptive FEC can be delivery
with the speed of service requirement under poor network
condition. However, FEC adds a redundancy into a packet and
the long FEC may be not suitable for a transmission with a
limited bandwidth.
Several tactical wireless networks may be connected
through gateway. Congestion may occur at the gateway when
there are too many traffics. The techniques that counteract
against congestion are related to a network traffic control.
Chen [6] presents a content transformation method to counteract congestion at the gateway of connected tactical wireless
networks. The content transformation technique proposed by
[6] transforms the content of information to reduce traffic flows
through the gateway. The transformation is only performed
when a congestion occurs. The transformation is based on
users intent by keeping the record of users preferences and
history at the gateway. The results by Chen [6] show that
the congestion is reduced when the content transformation is
applied. Nevertheless, the content transformation may remove
some quality of information. Careful consideration of a content
transformation mechanism is needed for specific application
that requires high quality of information.
C. Routing
Researches are concerning with routing protocol in a tactical
wireless network, where the environment is very unstable and
unsecured. The focus is on how to route message to the desired

destination providing different routes with different conditions.

The work by Han [12] proposes the link availability predictionbased reliable routing protocol. The protocol uses the statistic
and prediction model to predict a node movement and a link
failure in order to predict a link availability in each route.
Route is selected based on predicted availability. The result in
[12] shows that the quality of services of the proposed protocol
meets with the requirements.
Another focus on routing is related to security of the route.
In hostile environment, there is higher risk of the routes to
be attack by the enemy. Available route may be disabled by
enemy attack, or enemy can forge a fake node to drop or
modify information in the network. The work by Wei [13]
proposes the secure routing mechanism to detect a forge node
based on the trust value calculated from packet drop rate and
packet modification. The proposed protocol [13] is able to
detect a forge node with misbehaviours. However, the trust
value is only calculated from packet drops and modifications.
There is a chance of false detection, when a trusted node may
be dropped under poor network condition.
D. Security
Security is the main concern in tactical wireless networks.
The researches on the security of a tactical wireless network are concerning with solving congestion, reliability, and
availability issues caused by hostile attacks. A security may
prevent congestion caused by enemy flooding the networks.
Reliability of the network is degraded when an intruder forges
into the network and modified information and routing. The
work by Wei [14] proposes the intruder detection mechanism
using distributed node engine. A denial-of-services attack
tends to attack the availability of the network. A denialof-service attack includes jamming on physical layer of a
mobile node. The work by Jeung [15] proposes the protection
mechanism that protects a physical layer from a smart jammer
attack. A smart jammer can scan the wireless channels for
active channel and send jamming signal on that channel. The
mechanism proposed by [15] can lure the smart jammer to
the wrong channel preventing the actual active channel from
being jammed.
E. Management
Network management is a tool to maintain the operation
of the networks. Maintaining the network operation under
unstable environment is a challenge. The network is very
unstable in hostile environment. The effective network management framework must be able to keep track of rapid change
in the network. The work by Landry [4] proposes that the
QoS management can be achieved with less complexity if
the network has high predictability. Tactical wireless networks
consists of heterogeneous networks with different requirement
for QoS. To obtain end-to-end QoS across heterogeneous
networks, some management mechanism must be performed
at the edge of different networks. The work by Elmasry
[7] proposes the QoS management mechanism at the edge
of unsecure tactical wireless LAN and secure tactical WAN.

Research Interests

Conducted Researches

Issues Solved

Research Gaps

Research Challenges

Wireless Network Model

[10], [11]

Analyzing the network

No network model that capture hostile attacks

Model the hostile attacks

Performance

[6], [9]

Robustness, Congestion, Reliability

Trade-off on each technique

Improve performance against

instability with small tradeoff effect

Routing

[12], [13]

Robustness,
Reliability,
Availability, Security

Reliable route is not always

stable in hostile environment

Predictable route is more attractive in hostile environment

Security

[14], [15]

Security, Reliability, Availability

False detection of hostile

nodes in hostile environment

Precise detection of hostile

nodes in hostile environment

Management

[4], [7]

Congestion, Reliability

Management in uncertain
network is hard to achieved

Management with uncertain

network parameters

TABLE I
S UMMARY OF RESEARCH INTERESTS IN TACTICAL W IRELESS N ETWORKS

The proposed mechanism guarantees end-to-end QoS across

networks.
V. CHALLENGES AND PERSPECTIVE
Table I summarizes research interests, conducted researchs,
research gaps, and challenges in tactical wireless network.
Each topic is discussed as the following.
A. Wireless Network Model
The research interests on the wireless network model have
focused on understanding the behaviours and outcomes of the
tactical wireless networks, but none of these models includes
impacts of hostile attacks. The challenges is to model the
tactical wireless networks with impacts of hostile attacks.
These hostile attacks has various behaviours and the attacks
are random. The statistic and predictive methods may be
useful to model such behaviours of hostile attacks in tactical
wireless networks. The model should be able to predict attack
behaviours and sequence and what effects the attacks has on
a network.
B. Performance
The research interests on performance are concerning with
solving robustness, congestion, and reliability. The gap in
each research in this area is that there always a trade-off in
each method. For example, ARQ is a technique that increase
reliability by retransmitting undelivered packets. In very poor
network condition as in a hostile environment, there is a high
probability of packet dropped. Hence, there will be long delay
in a packet queue. The challenges in this area is to improve
performance against instability with small trade-off effect. The
idea is to go for an adaptive method that adapt to instability
of network. For example, when a network encounters large
amount of packet dropped, it should apply strong FEC to a
packet instead of using ARQ.

C. Routing
Interests on routing are concerning with solving robustness,
reliability, availability of route. Most of research are trying to
solve the issues by finding the most reliable route, which will
be sufficient for stable network. Unfortunately, most routes are
unstable in a hostile environment. The challenges of routing
protocol in a hostile environment is knowing future condition
of route such that a transmission scheme can be adapted to
that condition. Hence, the routes with ability to predict future
behavior are more attractive.
D. security
The researches on security tend to solve the problem of
congestion, reliability, and availability caused by hostile attacks. Researches are concerning with protecting information
from being stolen, dropped, or modified by intruders. Some
researchers are concerning with protecting the route. In addition, researches on security have tried to detect the intruders
in the networks from their misbehaviors such as dropping or
modifying packets. In a hostile environment, packet are regularly dropped and corrupted at a node. Detection mechanism
may see this behaviour as a threat and a false detection may
occur. The challenge is to design precise detection mechanism
that not only consider packet dropped from misbehavior but
also packet drop from a hostile environment.
E. Management
The researches on network management are tend to maintain
required QoS of the tactical wireless networks. This solve
the issues of congestion and reliability in tactical wireless
networks. A QoS management framework mostly manages a
network based on network performance parameters such as
throughput, delay, and packet error rate. These parameters
are very unstable in a hostile environment. Hence, a QoS
management in a tactical wireless network is more complex,
and the required QoS is hard to be achieved. The idea to
overcome this uncertainty is to predict the outcomes of these

network parameters in advanced using statistic and prediction

methods.
VI. C ONCLUSION
Tactical wireless networks are characterized by its operation in hostile environment, which has a large-magnitude
uncertainty. This uncertainty is due to high node movements,
intermittent interferences, and hostile attacks. The uncertainty
of a tactical wireless network in a hostile environment leads
to the issues of understanding the networks behaviour, robustness, congestion, reliability, availability and security. Research interests have tried to solve these issues by focusing
on wireless network model, performance, routing, security,
and management. Many researches have been conducted on
a tactical wireless network, but not many researches are
concerned about the impacts of a hostile environment on
tactical wireless network, especially the impacts of hostile
attacks. This leads to the gaps and challenges in the field of
tactical wireless network. The challenges includes modeling of
tactical wireless network in hostile environment, maintaining
performance against instability with little trade-offs, finding
suitable routing in an unstable environment, precise detection
of misbehaviour nodes or attacks, and managing network
under uncertain conditions.
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