| This paper discusses the challenges in and presents a solution to providing service assurances in heterogeneous wireless networks. More specifically, we address the problem of providing end-to-end (e2e) QoS assurances when traffic flows originate from, traverse and
terminate in network segments that are not only separated by geography (i.e., distant networks) but also differ in network characteristics
(e.g., widely differing link bandwidths and connectivity).
While the design of QoS mechanisms for wireless networks in general is a challenging task, the challenges are further compounded when the
characteristics of the intermediate network segments are not observable from the originating segment, and as a consequence have to be treated as &096;&096;opaque'' networks. In military MANETs (such as the FCS network), this limitation arises due to multi-level security (MLS) separation which makes
it impractical to impossible to pass information about the actual path taken by flows between same-level &096;&096;red'' security enclaves on different
network nodes in the insecure &096;&096;black'' network. In this paper, we address this challenge and design an e2e QoS mechanism that can provide
service assurances to a wide spectrum of applications whose flows need to traverse &096;&096;opaque'' network segments.
Our contribution is two-fold: (a) we provide a design of an e2e QoS assurance mechanism in wireless heterogeneous networking
environments wherein the characteristics of intermediate network may not e known to the network segment that originates the QoS request and (b) we use discrete event simulation techniques to analyze and illustrate
the potential/strengths of the proposed QoS solution. |