Guaranteed quality of service in tactical IP networks
Publish date: 2002-01-01
Report number: FOI-R--0641--SE
Pages: 43
Written in: Swedish
Abstract
In network centric warfare, it is important that the tactical communication is seamless. This means that, independent of terminal, access network and military unit, it should be possible to use those command and control communications services that are needed. TCP/IP, the technology behind Internet, has great potential for satisfying these requirements. A drawback with the TCP/IP protocols is that they have been designed for high capacity fixed networks, resulting in a quite low ability to guarantee the quality of offered communication services. Typical examples of quality requirements in this context are capacity and delay. Speech and video services, for example, require data transmissions with a low and steady delay. Some command and control communications services may not be possible to implement in low capacity networks without quality of service guarantees. This is especially true for mobile ad hoc networks, with high variations in radio link conditions. Hence, it is important to follow the ongoing development of TCP/IP protocols for Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. We describe the three most stable QoS protocols: Integrated Services, Differentiated Services and Multi-Protocol Label Switching; furthermore, we investigate their usability in tactical ad hoc networks.