Issues Associated with the Support of Military Precedence in IP Networks

IP networks, such as the Global Information Grid (GIG), must support Quality of Service (QoS) for a variety of applications. Messages generated by these applications are often characterized by military precedence, which indicates relative importance and urgency. The requirements for precedence-based voice and video support can be derived from current practices in circuit switched networks. A high precedence call which cannot be served because all trunks are occupied will preempt a lower precedence call. It will be necessary to create the equivalent capability in the GIG which will support voice and video calls. It is more difficult to develop a preemption concept for non-signaled messages such as file transfers and web transactions. In these applications high precedence messages can be favored without totally preempting lower precedence messages. Several strategies for doing so will be discussed in this paper.