Policy-based Bandwidth Management for Tactical Networks with the Agile Computing Middleware

Bandwidth allocation and enforcement in tactical networks is a challenging problem. The mobile ad-hoc wireless environment is bandwidth constrained and the bandwidth required by applications running at any given moment in time typically exceeds the bandwidth available. In addition, both network topology and availability of network resources vary rapidly in the mobile ad-hoc scenario. Therefore, it is important to properly realize allocation of bandwidth to the competing applications, monitoring of both available and assigned network resources, and the enforcement of constraints on channel usage. IHMC's agile computing middleware and KAoS policy and domain services components provide a resource management platform that enables dynamic control of application bandwidth utilization in a transparent manner. The agile computing middleware performs bandwidth monitoring and enforcement. It builds on top of the mockets library for the realization of traditional client/server application-level communications. The middleware also integrates with the FlexFeed component to provide applications with publish-subscribe communications semantics and to support service-specific instream data manipulation. The KAoS policy and domain services handle policy specification and distribution. KAoS policies can be used to specify bandwidth limits based on hosts, port numbers, and/or dataflows.