A QOS framework design based on DiffServ and SNMP for tactical networks

In the theater of war, mission-critical information is delivered over tactical networks, and a brigade dynamically conducts close combats and tactical operations on the basis of the military information. Therefore, the quality of service (QoS) of military information should be guaranteed to successfully perform tactical operations in the battle field. In this paper, the concern is a QoS framework design, not QoS algorithms such as packet scheduling and buffer management. As existing studies on QoS framework have focused on wired and fixed networks such as the Internet, it is difficult to apply them to tactical environment where network topology dynamically changes. Currently, applying commercial technologies to military communication system is a key issue due to low development cost and short development time. Thus, a tactical QoS framework is designed based on differentiated service (DiffServ) and simple network management protocol (SNMP) in this paper. The proposed QoS framework consists of tactical QoS information exchange, QoS module configuration, and DiffServ code point (DSCP) marking and is suitable for dynamic tactical environment. To test the operation of the proposed QoS framework, we simply established a tactical QoS framework testbed in real environment. Test results show that, by the proposed QoS framework, packets with a high priority experiences a shorter delay and a lower delay jitter than packets with a low priority.