End-to-end QoS over the GIG transport

The success of the Internet 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 will be provided by a network of very diverse networks using a common IP network layer. The GIG is supposed to meet the needs of a very diverse set of existing, emerging, and future applications. A number of challenges have to be overcome to provide the needed end-to-end performance, reliability, survivability, and security to the diverse applications over the diverse networks. The public Internet has not come close to solving even some of the challenges. Enterprise Intranets have made more progress but still do not meet all the challenges. The 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. This viewpoint allows more control over the GIG than is exercised in the public Internet. The controls are designed to be hierarchical. Innovative concepts are used to provide a framework for end-to-end QoS management and controls. The paper describes the hierarchy and the way the concepts fit together to create the QoS framework.