Conflict resolution for shared resources between network managers

The paper presents an approach for resolving conflicts between two network managers where one owns a specific set of resources that are meant to be shared with another peer network with its own network manger. As an illustration of this problem with DoD networks, a known case used here is the resource management of Network Centric Waveform (NCW) channels which are technically owned by the WIN-T program and managed by the WIN-T Network Management System (NMS), but are also shared with Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS). The JTRS WNW Network Manager (JWNM) can optimize the WNW network throughput more efficiently if it had a say in how the NCW channels can be allocated (i.e., which nodes with both, WNW and NCW capabilities, can use NCW channels at what times in order to optimize the WNW subnet throughput efficiency). The presented approach, while illustrated for the NCW case, can easily be adapted for other shared resources, such as the resources of an Airborne Network (AN) layer.