ITC/USA 2007 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Third Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2007 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / As part of Morgan’s iNET development, the Mixed Cellular and Mobile Ad hoc Network (MCMN) architecture has been 1proposed to provide coverage to over-the horizon test articles. Nodes in MCMN are assigned to one of three possible modes- Ad hoc, Cellular or Gateway. We present architecture for the proposed MCMN and some performance analysis to characterize the network. The problem of organizing nodes in this mixed network with optimal configuration is significant. This configuration gives nodes ability to know the best mode to operate and communicate with other nodes. Node organization is critical to the performance of the mixed network and to improve communication. The configuration of nodes required to optimally organize nodes in MCMN is demonstrated. The problem of evaluating configuration parameters for nodes in a mixed network is a nonlinear and complex one. This is due to the various components like the number of nodes, geographical location, signal strength, mobility, connectivity and others that are involved. Clustering techniques and algorithms have been used in literature to partition networks into clusters to support routing and network management. A clustering technique is employed to dynamically partition the aggregate network into Cluster Cells (CCs). A gateway node is selected for each CC which relays traffic from the cellular to the Ad hoc and vice versa. A trade-off analysis of the cellular boundary is presented using the maximum of the minimum data rate in the network. Numerical analysis and experiments are provided to show that the coverage can be extended to test articles in over-the-horizon region. It is also shown that, when the network is well organized, performance is improved.

ITC/USA 2005 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2005 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / In the iNET community, communications between Test Articles (TA) and Ground Station (GS) can be over a long distance course that places a TA at ranges where they are sometimes beyond line-of-sight (LoS) or over-the-horizon communications with the GS. In other cases, the TA moves out of the LoS communications range of GS. There is a need to provide communications to these TA at these over-the-horizon locations. The Cellular and Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) have attracted a lot of attention recently and the field continues to grow daily. The cellular network offers high capacity but limited in coverage due to its fixed base infrastructure. MANET on the other hand has a wide range of coverage and also high data rates, but its throughput performance is reduced at high capacity. The MANET cellular mixture network (MCMN) has been proposed to provide an extensive communications between the TA and GS in the iNET environment. This work presents a performance evaluation and analysis of the two different networks with respect to the performance needs of iNET environment which include coverage and throughput.