Summary

This Recommendation defines a package to provide signals and procedures necessary to realize multi-level precedence and pre-emption applications under H.248. While bandwidth and overload control, as well as judicious use of the Priority and Emergency ContextAttributes go a long way toward achieving these goals, existing systems also utilize tonal signals to inform end-users about the nature of the traffic, whether their current call is being pre-empted and whether or not their origination is being treated as priority traffic. These systems find a wide range of applications, including military command and control, government priority traffic and many disaster recovery and relief efforts. Priority traffic control and pre-emption are especially important in the time span immediately following a disaster when communications resources may be scarce.