Department of Defense Grant Awarded to Nick Mastronarde
Professor Mastronarde to conduct research on scheduling mission-critical flows in congested and contested airborne network environments
In particular, Professor Mastronarde's work will focus on smart joint scheduling and multi-hop/multi-path routing to ensure that the highest priority flows, defined in the context of the mission, are reliably delivered to their destinations in a timely fashion. To optimize the use of the network's limited physical resources and satisfy the stringent Quality of Service and data prioritization constraints inherent in mission-critical airborne networking and communications (ANC) applications, it is proposed to formulate the optimal joint scheduling and routing problem in ANC environments as a Markov decision process (MDP) that takes into account the deadlines and priorities of the heterogeneous information flows, the random traffic loads, the dynamic channel conditions, and the queue backlogs at the various network nodes. The developments of this project will be validated in a hybrid air-ground software-defined radio network test-bed.