Performance Evaluation of Transport Protocols in Tactical Network Environments

Wireless channels, heterogeneous technologies, constrained resources, interference, and high mobility of nodes are some of the characteristics that make communications in tactical networks extremely challenging. Given the availability of a number of transport protocols, designed with different use cases and motivations, and recent developments in the area of congestion control, it is of great interest to military applications developers to study the performance of such protocols in tactical network scenarios. To this end, this paper evaluates three TCP congestion control implementations, namely CUBIC, Compound TCP (CTCP), and Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR), in an emulated military-relevant networking environment. We then extend the study to include other transport protocols, more specifically: Stream Control Transmission Protocol (STCP), UDP-based Data Transfer protocol (UDT), Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC), and Mobile Sockets (Mockets). To evaluate their performance, we measured the average latency and throughput for several different common use cases and network conditions.