Proactive Fault and Healing Management (PFHM) for MANET

Enabling effective fault management in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), to guide the self healing mechanisms, can tremendously improve the reliability and performance of network-centric systems, such as Warfighter Information Network - Tactical. The existing approaches assume hard failures of network components and resource availability for healing process. However, MANET often exhibits highly unpredictable behaviors that are intermittent, transient and highly resource-constrained, in which traditional methods fail to respond. We propose a system of fault management that is capable of detecting soft failures for both known and unknown errors, to guide our comprehensive set of healing mechanisms and processes. The system realizes a concept from biological immune systems for its advantages to direct our strong network technology base for protection and recovery in MANETs. We also propose to use selected sets of key network parameters at various layers of protocol stack for execution and evaluation. Realistic scenarios from Army are chosen for experimental study. The effort of Phase I and Options will include developing the proposed fault and self-healing management, building the corresponding key algorithms, evaluating the feasibility under chosen scenarios, and designing the prototype of a system solution.