Allocation of limited resources in a system with a stable hierarchy (on the example of prospective military communications system)

The article is devoted to the resource allocation problem in a hierarchical social system where resources are distributed according to an agent's role in the system. We propose a general mathematical formulation and apply it to the problem of channel allocation in a special-purpose communication network. Each channel belongs to a certain class and the agents’ hierarchy impose constraints on the allocation such that a pair of agents with given roles should be assigned with channels from given classes. These constraints are represented as a structure which is called needs graph. An algorithm of the automatic partitioning of a radio communication system in accordance with the roles of the nodes is proposed. None of the nodes have complete knowledge about the entire communication system so an information about roles of the nodes is unknown in advance and is established by a beacon exchange process. We illustrate the proposed approach by an example of a special-purpose military communication networks