Collaborative Approaches to Probabilistic Reasoning in Network Management

Abstract

Tactical networks, networks designed to facilitate command and control capabilities for militaries, have key attributes that differ from the Internet. Characterizing, modeling, and exploiting our understanding of these differences is the focus of this research. The differences between tactical and commercial networks can be found primarily in the areas of access bandwidth, access diversity, access latency, core latency, subnet distribution, and network infrastructure. In this work we characterize and model these differences. These attributes affect research into issues such as overlays, service discovery, and server selection among others, as well as the deployment of services and systems in tactical networks. Researchers traditionally struggle with measuring, analyzing, or testing new ideas on tactical networks due to a lack of direct access, and thus this characterization is crucial to evolving this research field. In this work we develop a topology generator that creates realistic tactical networks that can be visualized, analyzed, and emulated. Topological features including geographically constrained line of sight networks, high density low bandwidth satellite networks, and the latest high bandwidth on- the-move networks are captured. All of these topological features can be mixed to create realistic networks for many different tactical scenarios. A web based visualization tool is developed, as well as the ability to export topologies to the Mininet network virtualization environment. Finally, state-of-the-art server selection algorithms are reviewed and found to perform poorly for tactical networks. We develop a collaborative algorithm tailored to the attributes of tactical networks, and utilize our generated networks to assess the algorithm, finding a reduction in utilized bandwidth and a significant reduction in client to server latency as key improvements.