Ensuring Quality of Service for IP Communication over Radio Links in Tactical Networks
Abstract
In the civil world of computer networks, the Internet Protocol (IP) turned out to be the dominating network protocol. The pace of hardware development, which supports this protocol, accelerated due to the sheer size and strong competition within the civil market. Recently Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) products have also penetrated the military communications market. The reason for this shift from customer designed to COTS based solutions can be found in the development costs, which are associated with these products, the decreased defense budgets, and also because of the incompatibility of the various solutions, which causes tremendous interoperability problems for joint missions of different nations. If COTS products are to be used for military applications, a series of problems arise. Besides the ruggedization of the equipment to withstand the hard environmental conditions, the usual physical layer available in the military environment is one of the toughest challenges. Contrary to the civilian network world, where fiber or at least copper connections are available, most military networks rely upon a wireless infrastructure such as LOS. All wireless links, e.g. LOS, satellite and mobile communication, are susceptible to the introduction of bit errors into the transmission stream. Although this problem is as old as the existence of wireless transmission schemes, its consequences are worsened in the case of IP transmission. IP was not originally designed for wireless communication and hence bit errors will cause degradation in application quality or decrease in application data rate. In severe cases a network can become blocked or the connection will fail. In particular affected wireless IP networks include those which have to rely on links with the currently available quality, must have a near 100% availability or should work under extreme environmental conditions.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 2006
- Accession Number
- ADA521152
Entities
People
- Markus Drasdo