Ticket Servers for Network Traffic Prioritization

For broadband packet networks to be widely useful to society, they must dynamically recognize some network flows, like those that deal with disaster response, military operations, or emergencies as having greater importance than others. This paper proposes an architecture of geographically distributed ticket servers that issue importance tickets that indicate 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. User agents contact ticket servers using an agent communication language; then a ticket server intelligent agent determines how valuable of a ticket to issue. Use of ticket servers and agent communication enables quick adaptation to dynamic context changes and provides user feedback so that high priority communication activities can be conducted effectively.