Social Cognitive Advancement for the Tactical Edge (SCATE)

Network protocols, such as link state routing and its variants, used in tactical mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) face serious problems of robustness and efficiency since the topological information becomes easily stale with fast network dynamics. Consequently, the emerging need to collect and exchange excessive network information increases the overhead and degrades the network performance. Social cognitive techniques that can provide tactical edges with situational awareness of the mission and supporting users are ultimately needed to sustain mission-critical network performance in the highly dynamic MANET environment. To address this critical need, we propose the following research and development efforts: (1) develop a probabilistic model for social and communication network interactions, (2) design robust, scalable, and efficient social and cognitive techniques to enhance tactical MANET communications and routing at the tactical edge, (3) implement the resulting network protocol on tactical radio platforms, and (4) demonstrate performance gains with respect to traditional network protocols in a wireless emulation testbed environment with real radios.