An Rsvp Surrogate for Guaranteed Bandwidth for Tactical Communications

This paper examines the use of the resource reservation protocol (RSVP) in tactical wireless networks. We propose a way of leveraging RSVP for the benefit of providing a guaranteed bandwidth quality of service (QoS) to edge network applications through the use of surrogate RSVP agents. Since RSVP has not been widely implemented at the network edge, the surrogate allows user applications that do not have RSVP capabilities to obtain a guaranteed bandwidth reservation. This guaranteed bandwidth capability may be useful for future tactical networks to communicate critical information through the global information grid (GIG). Also, we develop an approach to extend RSVP to Layer-2, so that we can utilize RSVP to provide bandwidth guarantees for contention-oriented tactical (link-layer) networks. The use of contention-based access schemes, such as demand assigned multiple access (DAMA), in conjunction with Layer-2 RSVP would enable improved bandwidth allocation capabilities and greater flexibility for tactical communications rather than simply providing a differentiated services (DiffServ) capability