End-to-end QoS over the GIG transport

The success of the Internet in providing a global information engine and tremendous productivity gains for commercial enterprises has prompted the Department of Defense to embark on realizing a very ambitious vision called the Global Information Grid (GIG). This vision involves information-driven transformation of government business and warfare operations using a ubiquitous communication infrastructure and a rich set of infocentric services. The transport of information in this vision will be provided by a network of very diverse networks (on ground, at and under sea, in the air, in space, wired and wireless) using a common IP network layer. These networks vary dramatically in their service capabilities: data rates, latency, error performance, reliability, etc. On the other hand, the GIG is supposed to meet the needs of a very diverse set of existing, emerging, and future applications. A major challenge is to provide the needed end-to-end performance, reliability, survivability, and security to a very diverse set of applications over a very diverse set of networks. Public Internet has not come close to solving this challenge and has not even had to deal with some of the challenges. Enterprise Intranets based on the same technology have made more progress but still do not meet all the challenges. This paper deals with an approach to meeting these challenges. Our approach considers the GIG to be a giant Intranet and a Private World Wide Web (WWW) serving all government users, including warfighters, command and controls, and business operations. This viewpoint allows more control over the GIG than is exercised in public Internet. The controls are designed to be hierarchical. Innovative concepts of Service Capability Domains (SCDs), SCD Service Level Capabilities, Route Service Level Capabilities, SCD admission controls, and inter SCD routing policies are used to provide a framework for end-to-end QoS management and controls. The paper describes the hierarchy and the way the above concepts fit together to create the QoS framework.