1|The Network Tasking Order (NTO)

Information and network communications play a vital role in the everyday operations of the United States Armed Forces. As the Department of Defense moves more toward net-centric warfare, this role will only increase. Traditional work in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) assumes there is no knowledge available about mobility patterns or communication traffic over time. However, this is generally not the case in military networks. In this article, we put forward the notion of a network tasking order (NTO), which exploits a priori knowledge of network characteristics such as required data input/output, communications capability, and communications capacity. The concept of an NTO is defined as a parallel to the air tasking order (ATO). Our premise is that the knowledge in an NTO can be used to achieve greater network reliability, to attain better network management, and to assist in optimizing network topology and routing. We present a scenario in which, based upon information contained in an NTO, low priority messages are either redirected or scaled back to avoid having high priority messages dropped from the network.