Shortest paths for routing information over temporally dynamic communication networks

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Abstract
There has been a significant increase in the number of sensors deployed to accomplish military missions. These sensors might be on manned or unmanned resources, and might collect quantitative and/or qualitative information important for mission success. Of critical importance for mission success is ensuring that the collected information is routed to the people/systems that need the information for the proper making of decisions. For military applications, routing of information across a communication network has typically been accomplished using fixed, a priori defined, routing paths. When bandwidth between resources is unlimited, this presents no problems. However, in bandwidth constrained environments, when not all information is able to be routed across the network, then fixed routing paths presents limitations in information reaching appropriate consumers. In this research, we consider the advantages to using dynamic shortest temporal path routes for the information, as opposed to fixed routing paths. Multiple metrics show empirically the benefit to dynamic shortest path routes.