Reservation-based Quality of Service (QoS) in an Airborne Network

This proposal by XPRT Solutions is a follow-on effort to their Phase I work that addressed the use of RSVP-AGG at the tactical edge of the AN.  In Phase II this work will be expanded by 1) building a test-bed representing the AN core network, 2) Building an edge platform, 3) developing additional QoS and resource management capabilities at the edge and 4) developing QoS configuration parameters at the hop.  XPRT will build a test-bed representing the characteristics of the AN and will investigate the AN core network model for realizing reservation-based QoS.  XPRT will then establish a test-bed for the AN, which will enable evaluating and validating the applicability and performance of the techniques that will be developed in the Phase II effort. XPRT is proposing that RSVP techniques based on the associated RFCs and supporting compatibility among the various COTS products should be used for the edge product to be developed in this effort. This strategy will facilitate the product development, since the detailed procedures and reference software code for some of them are easily available.  MLPP based flow control and CAC will be leveraged from XPRTs Comprehensive Edge Solutions Technology (CEST). BENEFIT: The theoretical analyses conducted during this Phase II effort can build foundations for future research and development in the area of QoS, specifically IntServ and DiffServ. For example, studying ARSVP from the angle of exploiting statistical multiplexing for BW savings while meeting QoS expectations, one can develop theoretical boundaries that can be compared to the theoretical boundaries of DiffServ based networks. This approach is in line with DARPAs vision of finding the theoretical boundaries for network protocols to bring our level of analytical understanding of networks to the same level of understanding the boundaries with a single communication channel (e.g., Shannon bound).  XPRT Solutions envisions that it can market QoS products as stand-alone HW (gateway or edge device) or as SW libraries that can reside on a third party HW with a well defined API. XPRT Solutions, through its development of the CEST product line, has a clear understanding of the value of developing SW that can be used to glue (integrate) networks from different vendors to achieve a required QoS.