Take as an example a data-sensing application that produces a large volume of messages that report on the state of many sensors – chamber temperature, pipeline pressure, coolant flow rate, control rod position – and uses Dispatch Router messaging technology to report the state of these sensors continually. These messages need not be acknowledged. If the receiver misses one, there will be another from the same sensor coming along one second later.

However, the system also has logic that diagnoses emergent error conditions. When it detects such an event, it uses the same router network to send a message that says The Reactor Core Has Been Breached. This message needs to get to its recipient as soon as possible, and it should not be delayed extra seconds just because there are a few million routine sensor measurements in front of it.

So – we introduce the concept of prioritized messaging. The AMQP protocol already provides for integers representing message priority to be stored in the message header. This development effort will:

1. detect and propagate message priority information in the dispatch router.
2. within the scope of each connection, process high-priority messages before low-priority messages, so that occasional high-priority messages will travel more quickly through a dispatch router network.

A perfect result would be that occasional high-priority messages, on a network with substantial low-priority traffic, travel through the network as fast as they would if there were no other traffic.