Traffic Prioritization in Tactical Networks Aligned with Commander

Information exchanges in tactical networks enable coordination, planning, and effective employment of platforms in support of national defense strategies. While spectrum utilization, satellite resources, and compression technologies are growing slowly, bandwidth drivers such as information gathering systems, cooperative engagement systems, and video teleconferencing are being increasingly relied upon to facilitate coordination among US and allied forces, and are growing more rapidly. In order to address conflicts or resource limitations, the Navy implements prioritizations to ensure that data from critical systems or of specific types are passed before lower precedence data. But the missions of today"s Navy continue to broaden with data priorities. Relevance of a particular piece of information to the mission may be dependent on details of the data itself, rather than simply the transport, protocol, source, or destination. Progeny Systems envisions a system through which the commander of a tactical grouping of ships may define prioritizations for data of many types based on rules that are evaluated in real-time as the traffic is processed. The critical differences will be the ability to inspect the data packets to apply priorities based on metadata or contents, and for the commander to modify the rules dynamically as the situation changes.