Evaluating the Impact of Jamming on Group Communication Protocols in Tactical Environments

Robust and reliable group communications protocols represent a key enabler for military operations in Tactical Edge Networks, with applications that typically exchange data in a 1-N or N-M fashion. However, group communications solutions for tactical environment need to be particularly resilient to jamming. Building on top of ongoing research within the NATO IST-161 RTG, this paper examines the performance and scalability of a variety of group communications protocols over the Anglova scenario with 96 nodes and several levels of jamming intensity (from 0 to 30dB). The results presented in this paper clearly indicate that protocols explicitly developed for tactical environments, such as GDEM and DisService, are better able to handle adversarial jamming, while commercial protocols either exhibit very degraded performance in case of jamming (NORM) or deliver inadequate performance even when communications are not disrupted (NATS). These considerations should be factored in military communication system design and deployment decisions.