An architecture for robust QoS provisioning for mobile tactical communications

We propose a rapidly deployable, heterogeneous network that is well suited for both multimedia and datagram traffic. The main motivation for our work was the recognition of the fact that in military and emergency type networks the stations may have diverse communication capabilities. While some stations have strong transmitters and their own power supply, some others are energy-constrained and have weaker signals which can only reach stations within their immediate vicinity. We refer to our system as the Hierarchical Heterogeneous Highly Mobile network (H3M). As the name suggests, the N3M consists of a hierarchy of heterogeneous stations distributed over a geographical area, linked together in a wireless communication system. The lowest level in the hierarchy is the cluster served by a mobile base station (MBS). In turn, the MBSs are organized into a virtual structure whose actual implementation is adaptive to the availability of assets in the network. Simulation and analysis revealed that H3M is robust, inherently supports multicast, scales well and is well suited for QoS provisioning in high-mobility environments, typical of tactical networks.