Deployment of Tactical Mobile Networks

Tactical mobile networks are at the forefront of military communication systems during military missions and in digitalized battlefields, and they can be also used for disaster recovery and rescue missions. These networks serve diverse range of applications to users with different mobility patterns and operate under adverse radio propagation conditions. They are highly dynamic and heterogeneous and must provide minimum level of connectivity and coverage without any supporting infrastructure. This makes their design and deployment much more challenging with much stringent requirements than for other types of mobile communication networks. As the complexity of telecommunication systems has increased together with many intricate relationships among various stakeholders, the selection and usage of network metrics has become much more important. Network metrics are crucial to define key performance indicators (KPIs) and service quality levels whilst some metrics have been standardized. Common telecommunication metrics have been reviewed and then specialised for tactical networks to understand different trade-offs such as reliable coverage versus quality of service. The collected metrics were then sorted into several main categories with majority of these metrics being either related to evaluating the system performance or evaluating the user experience.