A network control and management framework supporting military quality of service

To achieve good predictability of multimedia service behaviour in cell/packet based networks, end-to-end quality of service (QoS) guarantees must be supported. In military networks, when not enough capacity is available to support all traffic requests, messages carrying mission critical information should have higher priority over less important ones. In addition, it is preferable to gracefully "step down" the QoS of less important military flows in overloaded networks, instead of releasing these flows. We jointly call the above approaches delivering military QoS (M-QoS). This paper argues that M-QoS cannot be implemented in a flexible way using traditional standard ATM/IP network environments that are closed and monolithic. To achieve this purpose, the paper proposes the use of concepts of open and programmable multimedia networks currently under investigation by a number of research/standardisation institutions. A corresponding control and management architectural framework to deliver M-QoS is proposed. A description of an ATM experimental network, in which our framework has been implemented to deliver M-QoS, is also presented.