Mission-Critical Communication Architecture with Integrated QoS/QoP

Research Project Title
Mission-Critical Communication Architecture with Integrated QoS/QoP

Principal Investigator
Klara Nahrstedt

Unit # 26
Project Overview

We are investigating a mission-critical communication architecture where the interdependency of performance QoS and security QoP is critical and therefore must supports multi-level mission-criticality and multi-flavored security in vertical and horizontal communication scenarios. Accomplishing our goal requires several steps:

First, to understand the QoS/QoP interrelation and how it influences the design of mission critical communication architecture for vertical and horizontal communication, we will develop use cases for policy-based and trust-based differentiated services that support the multi-level mission criticality and multi-flavored security.
Second, the policy-based and trust-based differentiated services as well as protocols in this architecture will be parameterized and measured via QoS and QoP metrics.
Third, the mission-critical communication architecture should include mechanisms to provide the right balance at the right time between performance and security. As we define appropriate QoS and QoP metrics, we will investigate interdependency between QoS and QoP, and conduct appropriate risk-benefit analysis.
Fourth, mission-critical systems need to worry about the placement of control points for policy based and trust-based differentiation services to support multi-level mission-criticality and multiflavored security in horizontal and vertical communication. We will investigate strategic placement of control points to enable context-aware provisioning of QoS/QoP, and limit the impact of network security threats on QoS and traffic performance degradation on QoP.
Fifth, we will investigate mission-critical communication architecture of sentinels that will provide policy-based and trust-based differentiation services to support multi-level mission criticality and multi-flavored security using scalable QoS/QoP.

We propose to do the experimental validation of the sentinel critical-mission
communication architecture in the OPNET simulator which can provide us with different

simulated wireless and wired infrastructures available to the first responders. We can then build on top of the simulator as a middleware solution the critical-mission communication architecture that will have policy-based and trust-based differentiation services for multimedia data considering conversational and on-demand multimedia services (e.g., life voice communication, video capturing and streaming, retrieval of critical multimedia information).

Presentation in PDF format