Queuing over Ever-changing Communication Scenarios in Tactical Networks

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 A) through ever-changing network conditions (problem B) using cross-layer information exchange, such as buffer occupancy, data rate, queue size and latency (problem A|B). We introduce two stochastic models to create sequences of QoS-constrained messages (A) and to create ever-changing network conditions (B). In sequence, we sketch a control loop to shape A to B to test our hypothesis using model A|B, 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 A, B and A|B.