Real-Time Communications Resource Allocation Process, Architecture, and Algorithm

Abstract

In today's budget constrained environment the DoD, government agencies, and commercial businesses are seeking ways to maximize resource usage and, thereby, improve mission capacity without increasing spending. Communications is one major area that offers opportunities for such improvement. In particular, mobile communications capabilities enable the establishment of communications connectively without an existing infrastructure, especially in emergency situations. Aerial platforms, such as unmanned aerial systems (UASs), have been shown to be ideal for use in maintaining mobile networks. They enable deployment in areas impossible for other vehicles to access while maintaining the necessary mobility to provide coverage to highly dynamic or widely dispersed networks. When properly embedded into the architecture of a communications network, the cooperation and control of multiple UASs can form a multi-layered hierarchical mobile ad-hoc network (MANET). This UAS aided network provides transport of flows that span longer distances, yield better reliability, and achieve higher throughput. Although MANET can potentially offer multiple routes for each given source and destination pair, it is important for each network node to select an "appropriate" communications path that can satisfy the mission requirements. In this work, we propose an agent-based bandwidth reservation technique, called the Real-time Communications Resource Allocator (CRA). The CRA addresses the route selection problem by providing a process, architecture, and algorithm to allocate bandwidth to a task based on its resource requirements and currently available resources before the task starts. A test bed was constructed to prove this concept. Test results demonstrated that the agent is able to reserve and dynamically re-distribute bandwidth to missions, if needed, according to the mission requirements, priority, and link assessment during the On-Mission phase.