Quality-of-information aware networking for tactical military networks

In tactical military networks, decisions must often be made quickly based on information at hand. It is a challenge to provide decision makers with a notion of the quality of the information they have, or to provide a method by which decision makers can specify a required quality of information. It is a further challenge to honor requests for a required quality of information when selecting information sources, transporting information through a highly-dynamic network, and perhaps performing processing on that information. In this paper we motivate the need for a general, but formal, definition of quality-of-information so that this metric may be specified and potentially optimized by algorithms that operate a tactical network. Furthermore, we define a new notion, the operational information content capacity, to capture the amount and quality of information that a network can deliver.