Scalable Registration and Discovery of Devices in Low-Bandwidth Tactical Networks

Abstract

Management of RF Network and Tasking Infrastructure (MARTI) is a distributed system that discovers, tracks, coordinates, and manages the reception and transmission capabilities of an overlay network of RF devices. To enable scalable discovery and tracking, we employ a dynamic hierarchical domain management technique with features targeted for low-bandwidth networks. The dynamic hierarchy achieves the efficiency benefit of hierarchical systems, while avoiding single points of failure by dynamic reelection of domain manager (DM) nodes in response to node failures and disconnections. The Domain Announcement Protocol (DAP) employed for this purpose autonomously creates and organizes domains in a dynamic structure, supports splits and merges of domains, and employs a rich set of metrics for DM election, which enables DAP to adapt to loss of links or node failures. Furthermore the criteria used for the dynamic election of DMs are tuned so that DMs can also serve as distributed and survivable Directory Agents (DAs). Thus the DAP DMs which support the formation of domains are also used to realize the MARTI directory agent functions, which is an unusual example of efficient cross-layer functional re-use.