Naval sensors systems are complex due to their nature, the services they need to fulfil under rigorous constraints and the information they need to be aware on their environment. Sensors are among the sources of the information that is collected, exchanged and synthesized and their integration into a sensors systems architecture present numerous challenges. In this context, it is difficult to visualize those systems as a whole, and we lack methods to abstract the complexity level. We will introduce an approach to evaluate different architectural concepts and their impacts on the communication network. This paper presents our methodology involving: (1) an operational simulation, which allows to get closer to real use case; (2) a benchmark involving a middleware to simulate, in an abstract manner, communications between naval platforms, the operational environment, and sensors; (3) a network monitoring tool allowing to test new mechanisms that might be implemented in the final architecture.