Adaptation of RSVP-AGG protocol to tactical networks — A tactical edge open architecture concept

This paper addresses the adaptation of the RSVP-AGG (RSVP aggregate) protocol for the tactical edge. Deploying the standard RSVP-AGG protocol over the HAIPE encrypted core network has no benefits because the encrypted core network router cannot utilize the encrypted RSVP packets. This paper investigates the use of RSVP-AGG where the tactical edge aggregates all the plain text subnet RSVP tunnels over a single tunnel over the encrypted core. The tactical edge also ties the aggregate tunnel to the HAIPE IPSec tunnel. There are several gains from this approach, including: 1) The ability to use COTS RSVP protocol at the plain text enclaves; 2) Elimination of RSVP packets going over the encrypted core that has no use for them, which results in bandwidth savings; and 3) Acquiring the ability to tie RSVP to admission control and flow control at the tactical edge. The paper shows that the use of RSVP-AGG over the HAIPE encrypted core cannot follow RSVP-AGG RFC 3175 verbatim. While RSVP-AGG developed for COTS routers assumes the existence of multiple interfaces over the same router, a HAIPE has only one plain text side interface, thus forcing the deviation from the COTS protocol. Also, the existence of the HAIPE IPSec tunnel and fluctuations in the bandwidth over the encrypted core network can result in other deviations from the COTS implementation of RSVP-AGG protocol. The similarities and deviations from the COTS RFC 3175 in order to implement an RSVP-AGG protocol that can work over HAIPE are explained in this paper. The paper also presents some simulation results showing the bandwidth savings obtained from using RSVP-AGG over HAIPE.