Numerous proposals have been offered for providing guaranteed quality of service (QoS) in an Internet Protocol infrastructure for data flows identified as associated with a particular network service, such as video or voice. The known proposals, however, suffer from at least one of the disadvantages of: (1) requiring prior (or manual) complex configuration of routers for static reservation of network resources; (2) limiting dynamic reservation of network resources to available network resources that have not already been reserved for another data flow; or (3) a lack of security that may allow a malicious source to capture reserved resources by spoofing values in an unsecured IP packet.
For example, Multiprotocol Label Switching—Traffic Engineering (MPLS-TE) as described for example in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments (RFC) 2702 suffers from the disadvantage that explicit dedication (i.e., static reservation) of network resources for given data flows results in the reserved resources being unused (and therefore wasted) when the associated applications are not generating those given data flows. A router also could be statically configured to provide high priority to data flows specifying a particular differentiated services code point (DSCP) code point value, as described in RFC 2474 or 2475, or based on the Type of Services (ToS) field and IP source address in an IPv4 header, however the static configuration limits the availability of the network service to the manually configured sources; further, there is a lack of security in relying on DSCP (as well as the ToS field and IP source address field in an IPv4 header) that would enable a malicious source to capture the router resources by spoofing the DSCP, ToS, or IP source address values. The IETF RFCs 2205 and 2750 describe Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP), where if a router has available resources to provide a QoS requested by a host node that is to receive the network service, the router reserves the required resources and forwards the request to the next router in the path of the data flow until the data source is reached; if, however there are insufficient resources at any point in the path of the data flow, the request is rejected.
Hence, the foregoing IP based proposals for providing guaranteed quality of service are inadequate for dynamically providing guaranteed QoS for high priority network services, such as public safety, emergency services, or first-responder services in crisis or disaster scenarios.