A quality of service interface for military applications

As argued in the authors' previous publications, in overloaded military networks, the priority of an information flow should be managed as a function of its military value. Additionally, graceful degradation in QoS of less important flows should be supported. Both these features are jointly called delivering military QoS (M-QoS). To provide M-QoS, it is crucial to design a standard interface between user applications and network management. This paper proposes a framework for such an interface within the context of policy-enabled networks. The interface is generic in the sense that it assumes a set of military specific parameters are used to evaluate the ultimate priority of the flow according to policy(ies) currently implemented on the network. It is also generic because a military application does not need to know how the multimedia network provides the QoS. A possible approach to implement the M-QoS interface based on the use of the standard MPEG4 DAI interface is also described.