Diagnosing degradation of services in hybrid wireless tactical networks

In this paper, we consider a problem related to service management and deployment in tactical military networks. Tactical networks are typically hybrid wireless networks in which there are both static and mobile nodes with several wireless interfaces, such as 802.11, 3G, satellite, etc. In tactical networks, performance degradation in services could prove fatal, so it must be diagnosed quickly. This degradation could be due to mobility or bottlenecks in capacity at network layer. We provide a cross-layer framework to detect and diagnose these causes of performance degradation as part of service management; it includes a monitoring model of services and a network model for hybrid wireless networks. In addition, we give a working example in tactical military networks to illustrate our framework. We provide an experimental setup to simulate our hybrid wireless tactical network scenario along with preliminary results. © 2013 SPIE.