A heuristic for interoperability assurance in ATM networks

The Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Advanced Telecommunication/Information Distribution Research Program (ATIRP) is a vehicle for extending advanced commercial communication technologies to the battlefield environment, and ensuring seamless interoperability among these technologies within the Warfighter Information Network (WIN). As ATM products/systems of different vendors are deployed in the WIN, it is essential to develop necessary guidelines for fostering interoperability among these systems/products, and ensuring end-to-end interoperability across the WIN. The paper proposes and develops a heuristic for interoperability assurance in a multi-vendor ATM environment. It specifically builds upon the definition of interoperability to propose an interoperability assurance heuristic that comprises two main sets of tests, interworking tests and end-to-end quality of service (QOS) tests. The former attempts to ensure that ATM systems of different vendors interwork within the ATM environment. While the latter mostly focuses on ensuring that the ATM environment satisfies the QOS requirements of its applications. We present the generic templates of these tests as well as an overview of the required capabilities and tools (e.g., an ATM monitoring system) that are implemented for executing the proposed heuristic. A network operator can execute this heuristic with the current version of our ATM monitoring tools. However, further work is required to completely automate the execution of the heuristic