Assured network delivery

True quality of service (QoS) providing consistent performance under high stress conditions is necessary to meet the needs of many mission critical applications. The concept of network centric warfare relies heavily on distributed operations. Many activities centralized previously are now widely distributed. For real time and mission critical applications to function reliably, network services must provide a high degree of performance predictability. Currently, this degree of deterministic performance does not exist over IP-based networks. The objective of this paper is to document ongoing research that explores emerging technologies that potentially provide true end-to-end quality of service and predictability of performance under all conditions. To meet our research objective, one must be able to request this service from an end-to-end perspective, provision the service, and address the management and security issues. We are utilizing extensions to the session initiation protocol (SIP) as the primary mechanism to request and provide end-to-end service. The SIP messages that go between client-server or peer-to-peer are also translated into network service request messages. The network service requests are sent to the network services broker that provides the requisite network service. The request or the user can also be validated or authenticated by a policy server to ensure that only approved applications and authenticated users have access to these network services. We are exploring various network technologies in conjunction with the SIP design to demonstrate potential implementations. These include cetacean sequencing (for guaranteed bandwidth), Cisco routers (to show long vs. short latency links) and optical switches (to investigate fast reroute).