Adaptive hierarchical resource management for satellite channel in hybrid MANET-satellite-Internet network

MANETs are often deployed in an infrastructure-less or hostile region where the satellite provides the only link for the MANETs to communicate with the rest of the world. It faces many challenges to support multiple serviced communications between MANETs and Internet through satellite. In this paper, we propose an efficient resource management scheme called AHRM to dynamically allocate bandwidths among multiple MANET users and multiple priority and non-priority services sharing a multi-access satellite channel. It uses a flexible hierarchical structure to exploit the channel utility and resolve contention from two levels. A bandwidth adaptation algorithm is designed to adjust the allocation dynamically in response to traffic and link status changes. The algorithm turns out to be in line with reinforcement learning and is a customized version of it for the practical satellite network setting. Implementation issues are discussed. Simulation results are presented, showing that the scheme can guarantee fast delivery of critical messages in spite of channel contention, and significantly improve the performance of multiple services.