  Modern tactical operations have complex communication and computing
requirements, often involving different coalition teams, that cannot be
supported by today's mobile ad hoc networks. To this end, the emerging Software
Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm has the potential to enable the redesign and
successful deployment of these systems. In this paper, we propose a set of
novel architecture designs for SDN-enabled mobile ad hoc networks in the
tactical field. We discuss in detail the challenges raised by the ad hoc and
coalition network environment, and we present specific solutions to address
them. The proposed approaches build on evidence from experimental evaluation of
such architectures and leverage recent theoretical results from SDN deployments
in large backbone networks.
