Prioritization of Emergency Network Traffic Using Ticket Servers: A Performance Analysis

Broadband packet networks must dynamically recognize some network flows, like those that deal with disaster response, military operations, or emergencies as having greater importance than others. An architecture of geographically distributed ticket servers has been proposed to issue importance tickets to identify the priority that a flow should be given in the current dynamic network context. Any type of user or flow can be given priority, depending on the user needs and the context. Here the potential viability of such an architecture is studied with respect to the performance requirements of ticket servers, network overhead that would be added, and the severity of longer connection setup times. A hybrid simulation approach is used. The negotiation interaction between users and servers is simulated in a prototype. Network and ticket server performance are modeled using prototype results combined with analytical techniques for networks of queues. Two scenarios are studied, a hurricane event and an office building bombing event, and ticket server performance requirements and connection setup delays were not found to be prohibitive to the successful implementation of such an architecture.