A proxy gateway solution to provide QoS in tactical networks and disaster recovery scenarios

Many important public services, such as security and public health, as well as the modern tactical military scenarios, rely on Service-oriented Architectures (SoAs) and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components to enable the quick development and deployment of distributed services to respond quickly, reduce costs, and ease system integration. However, SoAs make use of verbose networking technologies and require reliable and relatively high bandwidth communications. Tactical scenarios normally cannot rely on such infrastructure and events like natural disasters can severely damage the network infrastructure in rural and urban environments. Thus, there is a need to develop solutions that provide SoA-based application and services running on heterogeneous and often constrained devices that compose tactical and mobile ad-hoc networks with Quality of Service (QoS) levels that meet their requirements. This paper presents the QoS-enabling features and the gateway operational mode (GM) of ACM NetProxy, the network proxy component of a communications middleware specifically developed to support applications in challenged networks. GM allows nodes in an ad-hoc wireless network to be quickly organized and to shape outbound communications to reduce bandwidth consumption and provide QoS. Experimental results obtained during a test in a field demonstration event show its efficiency.