Priority/Preemptive Capability within IP (SIP QoS in GIG-ES)

In this proposal, our team (Dataline and Covergence in subcontract) proposes to develop a Policy and Security Manager that provides Quality-of-Service (QoS) aware mechanisms to assure TCP/IP communications in tactical networks. Our approach is based on the SIP protocol, the IETF standard for monitoring, controlling, and securing real-time collaboration (RTC) applications such as VoIP, Chat, and Video Conferencing. Our approach includes significant innovations that address the need for assured delivery and the low tolerance for delay (latency), delay variation (jitter) and packet loss of real-time applications in tactical networks. These include policy management and control across all SIP devices for: QoS Operations and Management including layer 2/layer 3 QoS marking, QoS based routing, bandwidth policing & rate limits, call admission control, policy based session routing, shortest path media routing, and SLA monitoring and verification; Application Level Security including cryptographic authentication, identity-based access control, signaling and media encryption, protocol validation, PKI integration, and denial of service (DOS) prevention; and Interoperability, including near-end firewall traversal, far-end firewall traversal, and protocol normalization. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by building a testbed that leverages our extensive experience in, mixed-bandwidth, tactical networks for real-time collaboration.