Policy-based mobile ad hoc network management

TLDR

Ad hoc networking underpins future military network‑centric warfare, yet its highly dynamic, failure‑prone wireless links and stringent security and reliability demands motivate self‑forming, self‑configuring, and self‑healing capabilities. The paper proposes a policy‑based mobile ad hoc network management system to meet these security, reliability, and dynamic‑network requirements. The system uses high‑level policies interpreted by intelligent agents to automatically monitor, configure, and reconfigure network elements, while allowing user‑defined aggregation and filtering to reduce management station load and network traffic.

Abstract

Ad hoc networking is the basis of the future military network-centric warfare architecture. Such networks are highly dynamic in nature, as mobile ad hoc networks are formed over wireless links that are susceptible to failure. Strict requirements on security and reliability combined with the dynamic nature of the network provide a strong motivation for self-forming, self-configuring, and self-healing capabilities in the network. This paper describes a policy-based mobile ad hoc network management system that addresses these needs. The system provides the capability to express networking requirements in the form of policies at a high level and have them automatically realized in the network by intelligent agents. Our system provides the following capabilities: flexible monitoring and reporting that enables collection of management information from network elements at configurable intervals; automated configuration and reconfiguration of network elements based on reported network status; user-definable aggregation and filtering of monitored management information at the source of the data so as to reduce management station processing and network transmission overhead.