Network Monitoring Information Collection in the SDN-Enabled Airborne Tactical Network

Aviation swarm is considered to be a promising organization of air combat forces to execute combat and noncombat air missions. As a critical component of an aviation swarm, airborne tactical network (ATN) provides the communication capability. Considering the deficiencies of today's ATNs, it is unable to meet the communication demands of an aviation swarm, which motivates us to employ the software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm and design a SDN-enabled airborne tactical network (SD-ATN). For the SDN paradigm, network monitoring information (M-info) is the source of knowledge that forms the globe network view of the control plane; therefore, how to ensure that the control plane collects M-info from the data plane in a reliable and real-time way is a fundamental problem of designing the SD-ATN. To address this issue, a transmission framework called the MCF-SD-ATN is first designed, which makes it practical to provide dedicated quality of service (QoS) guarantees for the M-info collection. Then, a communication protocol called the MCP-SD-ATN is designed to implement the M-info collection work based on the MCF-SD-ATN. We implement the MCF-SD-ATN and the MCP-SD-ATN in EXata 5.1 for simulation. Simulation results show that the proposed solution is appropriate for M-info collection in the SD-ATN.