UNCLASSIFIED/UNLIMITED UNCLASSIFIED/UNLIMITED Quality of Service Support in IPv6-based Military Networks with Limited Bandwidth Links1

Adaptation of commercial Internet solutions for providing effective mechanisms supporting user’s mobility, information security and quality of services is the subject of several research projects running both nationally and internationally. From the military perspective, the IPv6-based solutions must provide required level of performance for networks deployed in specific tactical environment. Such networks- by their nature- are relatively unreliable and varying, both in location and topology. In tactical networks, significant amount of data, both time-critical and non-real time, has to be exchanged over disadvantage (also in terms of bandwidth limitation) links. This calls for improving the standard IPv6 mechanisms and elaboration of new effective methods of QoS support. The NATO Information System Technology Panel ongoing Support Project (PL-IST-003) on “Implementation of IPv6 Protocol for Tactical Interoperable Communications Networks – TICNET ” enters into these efforts. The paper gives an overview of the works on improving QoS support in IPv6-based military networks that are performed jointly by the teams from German and Polish research establishments. In particular, it presents the basic issues of providing QoS for both time-critical and non-real time services in tactical networks with limited bandwidth links and discusses the measurement methodology of prediction of available bandwidth. It also describes the result