PathFinder™: A Reconfigurable Predictive Software Agent for End-to-End QoS in MANETs

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are becoming increasingly more important to a variety of miniature, mobile communication applications. None are perhaps more important than applications to support our troops in the battlefield and homeland defense. As MANET architectures become more prevalent and the number of dynamic network nodes increases, emphasis must be placed on ensuring a high quality of communication service is delivered between end-users within this highly dynamic environment. NanoVision Technologies, Inc. is developing a new, innovative mobile ad hoc mesh networking (MANET) technology that ensures End-to-End (E2E) Quality of Service (QoS) for mobile platforms. PathFinder™ is a highly efficient, completely autonomous agent-based routing and QoS protocol that achieves guaranteed delivery of data by mapping the best possible path within a dynamic MANET. Our innovative scheme involves both the signaling protocols for distributing historical and predictive network state information and the underlying methodology for achieving reliable and efficient operation of the communications infrastructure through dynamic resource re-allocation. Optimum E2E traffic flow is managed by the transfer of multi-link “Traffic Signals” that transfer minimum information between nodes adaptively so that the MANET as a whole is “self-aware” and “self-reconfigurable” with as low overhead as possible. The novel PathFinder™ architecture provides a method to achieve reliable communications through adaptive cognitive self-optimizing communications.