PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF AN UNMANNED SYSTEMS COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK USING DATA DISTRIBUTION SERVICE IN A LOSSY ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

The Ship Integration Program Office (PMW760) is interested in the prospect of having a unified, cohesive communications protocol that can be used by all unmanned systems under their purview. The Data Distribution Service (DDS) is a prime candidate for such cohesive communications using point-to-point links. The objective of this thesis is to assess the performance of DDS in a network architecture that fits the naval use case criteria. We propose a network architecture that incorporates Satellite Communications (SATCOM) and Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) links to test the ability of DDS to execute cohesive communications between the network nodes within constraints of the scenario setup. We use a network emulator, Mininet, to set up the network parameters and investigate the throughput and latency performance of the individual point-to-point links across various data sample sizes. Simulations are conducted to measure throughput and latency under different network configurations (Ideal, Jitter and Multi-Flow) using the Real-Time Innovation Perftest software tool. For the Ideal and Jitter configurations, the simulations are performed for RELIABLE and BEST EFFORT communications as well as with and without implementation of DDS security. We also conduct simulations in the Multi-Flow configurations to evaluate how simultaneous multi-flow data (traffic data running in parallel within the network nodes) contend for the network resources and impact performance.