ISDN and the DOD

This paper looks at ISDN and its impact on the DOD. Most DOD requirements will be met by the standard commercial ISDN offerings. However, there are some areas, such as Multi-Level Precedence and Preemption, that will not be met by the current standards. ISDN provides standard interfaces to a variety of long-haul networks. Initially, these other networks are the fixed commercial networks but eventually other networks could be included. Therefore, other major issues include (a) DOD exploitation of the advanced capabilities and uniform protocol suites of ISDN versus use of DOD-specific protocols, (b) interworking among diverse networks, and (c) the method of organization of the DOD networks. Military requirements favor Self-Organizing-Networks, but for very large networks the costs may outweigh the benefits.