SBIR-STTR Award

The Quality of Service Traffic Manager (QTM) software tool provides ability to actively change QoS policies and packet priorities based on characteristics of transmitted packets or priorities imposed by Commanders. QTM bridges the communication gap between applications, services, and network configuration components. The QTM technical approach leverages Referentia’s Smart Data Flow (SDF) software based QoS monitoring and policy configuration management tool for Cisco routers and switches. SDF’s capability to configure QoS, manage routing layer, provide visibility into network flow, and send synthetic traffic between Cisco routers to measure traffic conditions will be integrated into QTM. QTM development risk benefits from SDF’s QoS and NetFlow capabilities that are at TRL 7. SDF will be upgraded to expand network device support beyond Cisco to include bandwidth appliances found in WIN-T. Furthermore, SDF’s built-in QoS capabilities will include webservices and application control to meet the QTM requirements. The webservices API will determine message destination and bandwidth conditions (i.e. bandwidth, jitter, latency, and loss). During congestion events, QTM notifies applications to automatically throttle traffic based on priority levels corresponding to the commander’s intent. This solution meets the pressing need for efficient battlefield utilization, optimal data throughput, on-the-move critical information exchange, and rapid infrastructure modernization.

Keywords:
Quality Of Service, Qos, Network, Adaptable, Bandwidth Optimization, Service Oriented Architecture, Soa

As the Army transitions numerous capabilities into network-accessible services, available bandwidth is emerging as the most prominent bottleneck. There exists a need for a system to manage the various components and devices that make up the network to efficiently and effectively manage the network traffic. QTM research is aimed as providing technology that can benefit the TITAN Network Management (NM) system in dealing with Quality of Service (QoS) in a military TEN setting. The specific portion of the NM is the adaptive middle ware layer that deal with autonomous adaptation of the network communication over a TEN. The key goal of this effort is to develop a network management tool for the United States Army that allows for more dynamic QoS visibility and control on the routers, links, and flows that help automate actions to meet the commander’s intent of tactical communications and interface to the TITAN NM system.

Keywords:
Quality Of Service, Network Policy, Tactical Edge Networks, Adaptive Middleware, Autonomic Networking