Priority Service

Note:  The ability to give one set of traffic priority over another set of traffic is a significant issue in the Network Neutrality debate.

NCS Emergency Response / Emergency Alert

Telecommunications Service Priorty

The Telecommunications Service Priority (TSP) Program is a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) program used to identify and prioritize telecommunication services that support national security or emergency preparedness (NS/EP) missions. Many ISPs use TSP status, for example, for their circuits to their NOC.  The TSP Program also provides a legal means for the telecommunications industry to provide preferential treatment to services enrolled in the program. To learn if you are eligible for TSP, please go to the TSP Website.

See also Wireless Priority Service

Internet Emergency Preference Scheme

IEPS webpage:  Recommendations E.106 was established by the International Telecommunication Union, Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), March 17, 2000.  Recommendation E.106 recognizes the requirement for priority communications among governmental, civil, and other essential users of public telecommunication services in crisis situations, such as earthquakes, severe storms, and floods.

IEPS will provide authorized users priority access to telecommunication services and priority processing of communications in support of recovery operations during emergency events.

Work has been initiated in the following industry technology and standards bodies to develop provisions for special handling of priority services to support critical communications in the emerging packet-based network environment:
 

• IETF - Internet Engineering Task Force
• ITU-T - International Telecommunication Union - Telecommunication Standardization Sector
• ETSI TIPHON - European Telecommunications Standards Institute, Telecommunications and Internet Harmonization over Networks
• National Communications System
• See the Government Emergency Telecommunications System
• NCS Tech Note Differentiated Services — One Solution for Priority Over the Internet . by Ray Young.
•  NSTAC is looking at how a priority communitions system could be adopted for the Internet.


REFERENCE DOCUMENTS FOR DOWNLOADING: (links no longer work)

• ITU-T Recommendations E.106 - e106.doc
• USA contribution to ITU-T Study Groups - ieps contribution.doc
• NCS contribution to ETSI TIPHON - 17TD116.doc
• Internet Draft, June 16, 2000 - draft-folts-ohno-ieps-considerations-00.txt
• White paper IP Telephony - VoIP WhitePaper.doc
• IEPS BOF Presentation IETF 48, Folts - IEPS BOF Pres HF.ppt
• IEPS BOF Presentation IETF 48, Carlberg - IEPS BOF Pres KC.ppt
• Internet Draft, November, 2000 - Framework for Supporting IEPS in IP Telephony - draft-carlberg-ieps-framework-00.txt

Notes

• DOS Opportunity where bad guys send out barrage of high priority packets

Links

• GETS Government Emergency Telecommunications Service

• TSP Telecommunications Service Priority
• IETF
• DiSp Differentiated Services in the Internet
• RFC 791 Internet Protocol Sec. 3.1 1981 (defining Type of Service field)

• The Type of Service provides an indication of the abstract
      parameters of the quality of service desired.  These parameters are
      to be used to guide the selection of the actual service parameters
      when transmitting a datagram through a particular network.  Several
      networks offer service precedence, which somehow treats high
      precedence traffic as more important than other traffic (generally
      by accepting only traffic above a certain precedence at time of high
      load).  The major choice is a three way tradeoff between low-delay,
      high-reliability, and high-throughput.
  
        Bits 0-2:  Precedence.
        Bit    3:  0 = Normal Delay,      1 = Low Delay.
        Bits   4:  0 = Normal Throughput, 1 = High Throughput.
        Bits   5:  0 = Normal Relibility, 1 = High Relibility.
        Bit  6-7:  Reserved for Future Use.
  
           0     1     2     3     4     5     6     7
        +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+
        |                 |     |     |     |     |     |
        |   PRECEDENCE    |  D  |  T  |  R  |  0  |  0  |
        |                 |     |     |     |     |     |
        +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+
  
          Precedence
  
            111 - Network Control
            110 - Internetwork Control
            101 - CRITIC/ECP
            100 - Flash Override
            011 - Flash
            010 - Immediate
            001 - Priority
            000 - Routine
  
      The use of the Delay, Throughput, and Reliability indications may
      increase the cost (in some sense) of the service.  In many networks
      better performance for one of these parameters is coupled with worse
      performance on another.  Except for very unusual cases at most two
      of these three indications should be set.
  
      The type of service is used to specify the treatment of the datagram
      during its transmission through the internet system.  Example
      mappings of the internet type of service to the actual service
      provided on networks such as AUTODIN II, ARPANET, SATNET, and PRNET
      is given in "Service Mappings" [8].
  
      The Network Control precedence designation is intended to be used
      within a network only.  The actual use and control of that
      designation is up to each network. The Internetwork Control
      designation is intended for use by gateway control originators only.
      If the actual use of these precedence designations is of concern to
      a particular network, it is the responsibility of that network to
      control the access to, and use of, those precedence designations.

• Working Groups
  • Next Steps in Signaling (NSIS): The WG is responsible for standardizing an IP signaling protocol with QoS signaling as the first use case. The WG will concentrate on a two-layer signaling paradign. The intention is to re-use, where appropriate, the protocol mechanisms of RSVP, which at the same time simplifying it and applying a more general signaling model.
  • Internet Emergency Preparedness (ieprep)
    • Internet-Drafts:
    Framework for Supporting Emergency Telecommunications Service (ETS) in IP Telephony (68414 bytes)
    Emergency Telecommunications Services (ETS) Requirements for a Single Administrative Domain (15904 bytes)
    A Framework for Supporting Emergency Telecommunications Services (ETS) Within a Single Administrative Domain (43505 bytes)
    

    Request For Comments:

    Requirements for Resource Priority Mechanisms for the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) (RFC 3487) (39615 bytes)
    Internet Emergency Preparedness (IEPREP)Telephony Topology Terminology (RFC 3523) (10190 bytes)
    IP Telephony Requirements for Emergency Telecommunication Service (RFC 3690) (13919 bytes)
    General Requirements for Emergency Telecommunication Service (RFC 3689) (21680 bytes)
    • Differentiated Service (DiffServ)
      • Internet Draft, A Framework for Differentiated Services (1999)
      • Definition of the Differentiated Services Field (DS Field) in the IPv4 and IPv6 Headers (RFC 2474) (50576 bytes)
      • An Architecture for Differentiated Services (RFC 2475) (94788 bytes)
      • Assured Forwarding PHB Group (RFC 2597) (24068 bytes)
• P. Almquist, IETF RFC 1349, Type of Service in the Internet Protocol Suite (1992).
• Resource Reservation Setup Proptocol
• Multiprotocol Lable Switching (MPLS)

Issues

Emergency Communications requirements:

• Signaling (signaling a request for emergency communications)
• Resource Provisioning
• Security
• Network engineering

Emergency communications issues

• outages versus congestion

News

• Internet traffic prioritisation, OECD 6/5/2007
• Internet traffic prioritisation, OECD 4/18/2007