Analysis and demonstration of policy-based satellite communications resource management

Bandwidth requirements in the tactical satellite communications (SATCOM) environment are driven by widely varying battle dynamics. Problematically, however, SATCOM resource management is static, with capacity provisioning based on anticipated average peak demand. To overcome the inevitable shortfalls inherent in this approach, two capabilities are required. The first is integrated situational awareness (SA) of SATCOM network status, including views of disruptions and associated impacts. The second required capability is the ability to allocate bandwidth in near real-time to better meet the urgent needs of Warfighters. This paper describes management architectures in which policy-based automation is applied to the dynamic bandwidth allocation problem for tactical satellite networks using policies derived from both current and near-term historical SA data. Resource management, within the broader policy-based network management, needs to track satellite resource pool capacity, current utilization, and allocation based on instantaneous demand. Dynamic allocation of bulk capacity and admission of more granular per data flow level traffic needs to be governed by policies comprising location, time, organization, associated priorities, etc. Simulated communications traffic resulting from realistic operational scenarios is used to analyze dynamic policy-based resource management. Also presented is a design approach and test bed for live demonstrations of policy-based resource management of Internet Protocol (IP) flows over SPACEWAY, a commercial Ka-band multiple-beam packet processing satellite system, interconnected with a terrestrial IP network.