A technique for monitoring quality of service in tactical data networks

This paper describes an automated mechanism for near-real-time measurement of the quality of service (QoS) provided in tactical data networks with multiple manager environments. QoS is defined in terms of thresholds of reachability with respect to backbone networks that support wide-area transport services between communities of service users. Agents will be installed on monitored service user terminals. This technique will let managers at multiple echelons obtain consistent and intuitive indications of QoS without burdening managers or the network with excessive polling or asynchronous events. A prototype was constructed in the form of a state machine to determine the practicality of this technique.