Mobile Ad Hoc NETworks (MANETs) are generally thought of as infrastructureless and largely “un-managed” network deployments, capable of accommodating highly dynamic network topologies. Yet, while the network infrastructure may be “un-managed”, monitoring the network performance and setting configuration parameters once deployed, remains important in order to ensure proper “tuning” and maintenance of a MANET. This paper describes a management framework for the MANET routing protocol OLSRv2, and its constituent protocol NHDP. It does so by presenting considerations for “what to monitor and manage” in an OLSRv2 network, and how. The approach developed is based on the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), and thus this paper details the various Management Information Bases (MIBs) for router status monitoring and control - as well as a novel approach to history-based performance monitoring. While SNMP may not be optimally designed for MANETs, it is chosen due to it being the predominant protocol for IP network management - and thus, efforts are made in this paper to “adapt” the management tools within the SNMP framework for reasonable behavior also in a MANET environment.

The author proposes and analyses an approach to support both precedence and preemption (P&P) and QoS handling in common packet transport infrastructures. Precedence has to do with the relative importance of the information content, whereas preemption has to do with mechanisms to deny lower precedence traffic access to network resources in favour of higher precedence traffic, when necessary. The author's approach to this duality is to enhance active queue management (AQM) techniques to provide P&P capabilities and rely on standard, well-studied QoS schedulers, for example, Weighted Round Robin, Class-Based Weighted Fair Queuing, etc., for handling QoS requirements. The present scheme allows low-order queues (within the context of QoS handling) to plead up to the next higher-order queue for help in alleviating queue congestion under periods of communication link overload. The scheme is referred as the cross-queue-AQM (CQ-ACM) scheme and can be extended to higher numbers of queues and any type of scheduler. Through extensive simulation studies, the performance of CQ-AQM scheme under heavy traffic limits is investigated, where preemption is required. The performance metrics of interest to this analysis are packet delay, packet loss and throughput as a function of the packet QoS class and P-L. Further, two new metrics of merit, Gain and System Efficiency, are defined, which are specific to P&P considerations. The studies concentrated on both flow-controlled and non-flow-controlled traffic, as well as mixed traffic conditions. Simulation results show that the algorithms perform extremely well for all cases studied.

A comparison is made of the end-to-end delay performance of two service disciplines that a terminal adaptor (TA) can use to multiplex the pipelined synchronous native protocol frames arriving over the low-speed lines. In one scheme, the TA pipelines one synchronous frame at a time, waiting, if it needs to, for the successive link-access protocol D-channel (LAPD) packets from this one synchronous frame to accumulate. In the other scheme, the TA interleaves the LAPD packets from various synchronous frames. Using an analytical model for the first scheme, it is concluded that if the trunk speed (TA-to-network switch) to line speed ratio is greater than or equal to four, then over the range of useful loading, interleaved pipelining yields smaller mean delays than noninterleaved pipelining. If the ratio is less than four, interleaving yields larger mean delays for negative protocols which require a buildout delay at the egress TA.>

A description is given of the research work at University College London on network interconnection. A particular approach to internetworking is discussed and compared to other approaches reported in the literature. The architecture of a LAN (local-area-network) based interconnection system is described, and some important concepts are deduced. These concepts are discussed in light of the current theory of protocol interaction, and two protocol conversion techniques are compared. The problems of addressing and access control in general network interconnection are described, and a case is made for application-layer relaying as the general solution.>