A unified network approach to the control of survivable multimedia communication networks

A major thrust in modern military communication systems is to integrate all of the existing and future propagation media resources in a communication system with the objective of providing more reliable, survivable, enduring communication system performance in a stressed environment. An analysis of the objectives, including survivability, network throughput, and delay, to be achieved by integrating communication resources to create a multimedia network, is presented. Given the objectives of integrating resources, an architecture and a suite of algorithms are described which provide a means to use (integrate) any and all media resources, including external networks, multiple access, point-to-multipoint and multipoint-to-multipoint media. A strategy for providing integrated services over heterogeneous links, including radio links, is described. A type-of-service routing algorithm (and its associated topology update strategy) is described which individually computes routes for circuit-switched traffic and various types of packet-switched traffic