Aiming in Harsh Environments: A New Framework for Flexible and Adaptive Resource Management

The harsh environment imposes a unique set of challenges on networking strategies. In such circumstances, the environmental impact on network resources and long-time unattended maintenance has not been well investigated yet. To address these challenges, we propose a flexible and adaptive resource management framework that incorporates environment awareness functionality. In particular, we propose a new network architecture and introduce the new functionalities against the traditional network components. The novelties of the proposed architecture include a deep-learning-based environment resource prediction module and a self-organized service management module. Specifically, the available network resource under various environmental conditions is predicted by using the prediction module. Then, based on the prediction, an environment-oriented resource allocation method is developed to optimize the system utility. To demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed new functionalities, we examine the method via an experiment in a case study. Finally, we introduce several promising directions of resource management in harsh environments that can be extended from this article.