Queuing Over Ever-Changing Communication Scenarios in Tactical Networks
Roberto Rigolin F. Lopes, Pooja Hanavadi Balaraju, Paulo H. L. Rettore, Peter Sevenich
Abstract
This paper introduces a hierarchy of queues complementing each other to handle ever-changing communication scenarios in tactical networks. The first queue stores the QoS-constrained messages from command and control systems. These messages are fragmented into IP packets, which are stored in a queue of packets (second) to be sent to the radio buffer (third), which is a queue with limited space therefore, open to overflow. We start with the hypothesis that these three queues can handle ever-changing user(s) data flows (problem <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$A$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) through ever-changing network conditions (problem <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$B$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) using cross-layer information exchange, such as buffer occupancy, data rate, queue size and latency (problem <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$A|B$</tex-math></inline-formula> ). We introduce two stochastic models to create sequences of QoS-constrained messages ( <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$A$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) and to create ever-changing network conditions ( <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$B$</tex-math></inline-formula> ). In sequence, we sketch a control loop to shape <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$A$</tex-math></inline-formula> to <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$B\;$</tex-math></inline-formula> to test our hypothesis using model <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$A|B$</tex-math></inline-formula> , which defines enforcement points at the incoming/outgoing chains of the system together with a control plane. Then, we discuss experimental results in a network with VHF radios using data flows that overflows the radio buffer over ever-changing data rate patterns. We discuss quantitative results showing the performance and limitations of our solutions for problems <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$A$</tex-math></inline-formula> , <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$B$</tex-math></inline-formula> , and <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$A|B$</tex-math></inline-formula> .