On Respecting Interdependence Between Queueing Policy and Message Value

Introduction As electronic messaging grew, it quickly became evident that some messages were more time critical than others. With this realization, a message priority scheme was instituted. Military torn-tape relays typically used four or five levels of priority, from low priority to high, such as routine, priority, immediate and flash. It was a general tenet of operation, that once a priority was assigned by the originator, it was almost without exception invariant over the message’s lifetime in transit through the communications network. As the operational and conflict bandwidth increased as weaponry became more and more sophisticated, and as command and control messages started to grow in volume and compete with potentially shrinking transport bandwidth, it became clear that we needed to focus on two considerations: