Towards Automation of Management and Planning for Future Military Tactical Networks

Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) have been adopted as the building blocks of future military tactical networks. We believe that the dynamic nature of such networks makes the automation of both network management and network planning a necessity rather than just a desirable feature. The creation of DRAMA, a policy-based network management system designed for managing dynamic MANETs, is the first step of this automation effort. Since the current practice requires that policies be specified manually, which we have found to be a challenging task, it is highly desirable to automate the generation of network management policies by network planning. In this paper, we present our vision of automating the management and planning of future tactical networks, describe what has been accomplished and ongoing activities, and discuss future work towards achieving this vision.