Improved Fault Management/Correlation for Tactical Networks

In recent years, mobile ad-hoc networks have received considerable attention due to their capabilities to enable data networking without any infrastructure support. However, the nodes use wireless radios with limited bandwidth and typically high loss rates to communicate; every node participates in packet forwarding, and the topology of the network is dynamic. The U.S. military is planning deployment of mobile ad-hoc networks and commercial applications are emerging. Past research on such networks has been focused primarily on the enabling technologies such as wireless radios, media access, and routing. The challenging task of managing these networks has to now be addressed to ensure effective communications. Today’s commercial network management tools were mostly designed for networks with stable topologies and abundant capacity. These tools are ill-suited for mobile ad-hoc networks. In this Phase I study we propose to achieve a characterization of faults for the ad-hoc network that can be then used as the foundation for proposing an architecture to effectively deal with these faults. We will investigate distributive correlation techniques, root cause analysis based on network event causality model, and mission network optimization all in support of being able to propose an architecture design for a solution to the challenge of fault management/correlation for tactical ad-hoc networks.