Quality of service in mission orientated ad-hoc networks

Normal design practice is to decouple the design of applications using a network from the design of the network itself. Designers optimize network performance by only focusing on network transport layer mechanisms for robustness (connectivity), efficiency (throughput), and speed of service (latency). Applications offer loads to the network and rely on the QoS function in the network to prioritize the traffic flows. By contrast, network centric operations focus on application layer features like situation awareness and synchronization to enhance force effectiveness. Therefore, in contrast to enterprise networks in which QoS processes messages based on fixed priorities by data type, in mission orientated MANET, QoS must be a cooperative function between application and network resource management that uses dynamic priority allocations derived from task priorities established by commanders within the echelon hierarchies. (1,2).