  Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a programmable approach for
provisioning and managing network resources by defining a clear separation
between the control and data forwarding planes. Nowadays SDN has gained
significant attention in the military domain. Its use in the battlefield
communication facilitates the end-to-end interactions and assists the
exploitation of edge computing resources for processing data in the proximity.
However, there are still various challenges related to the security and
interoperability among several heterogeneous, dynamic, intermittent, and data
packet technologies like multi-bearer network (MBN) that need to be addressed
to leverage the benefits of SDN in tactical environments. In this chapter, we
explicitly analyse these challenges and review the current research initiatives
in SDN-enabled tactical networks. We also present a taxonomy on SDN-based
tactical network orchestration according to the identified challenges and map
the existing works to the taxonomy aiming at determining the research gaps and
suggesting future directions.
