Constructing Predictable Applications for Military ad-hoc Wireless Networks

War-fighters, like any other end user, are not interested in the details of how data flows in their networking equipment, they are interested in the delivered performance from their applications. This is not just a question of the delivery of information or an action but the reproducible timeliness of that interaction on its "predictability". It is such predictability that provide the war-fighter with the confidence to rely on the network as a weapons system. What are the data network properties that are key in delivering predictable outcomes to the war-fighter? For many applications such quality of experience is not constrained by bandwidth but by the end-to-end delay and loss delivered at the data network level to the application's data/information exchanges. In this paper we report on an approach which ties the user's quality of experience of an application to the quality delivered by the underlying data network. To predict the likely war-fighter experience it is necessary to quantify the relationship between the data network's delivered quality and the quality of experience delivered to the war-fighter. With such characterizations it becomes possible to assess and manage the timeliness of the flow of information, and plan accordingly