Proactive and adaptive reconfiguration for reliable communication in tactical networks

Due to the layer-independency design, in current wireless networks, only after a complete failure occurs in one of the involved layers, is the next higher layer notified, and by then performance degradation may already be observed. Also, the new connection establishment process has to go through all the layers. It is time-consuming and usually results in an extra latency and resource unavailability within the transition region, which in turn leads to inefficient bandwidth usage and a poor user experience. Moreover, the root-cause of the connection termination is typically hidden, and not utilized for the repair or reestablishment. To mitigate the problem, in this paper, we propose a proactive and adaptive cross-layer reconfiguration (PACR) scheme for reliable communication in tactical networks. The PACR scheme allows the user (e.g., network operator) to adaptively reconfigure operating parameters in the corresponding layers through proactive prediction, root-cause identification, and cross-layer negotiations. The core of the PACR scheme is an integrated crosslayer information sharing architecture that expedites information exchange and inter-layer interactions between different network layers in a proactive manner. Through simulation and experiments, it has been shown that our proposed PACR scheme can significantly improve the network performance, and facilitate the nodes or users to make smart decisions accordingly in an adaptive manner.