Providing Local Content Discovery and Sharing in Mobile Tactical Networks

The tactical edge is filled with rich content, providing real-time intelligence and situation awareness to the warfighter. The current network architecture lacks support for lateral sharing of this critical content. Content is currently accessed from known servers and may require reach-back over bandwidth-constrained links. In this work we present SCALE, a Scalable Content-centric Architecture ensuring Locality and Efficiency. SCALE focuses on sharing data as it is created and is optimized for ad hoc collections of mobile nodes, rather than defined clients and servers. Any node can create and share content and nodes can discover content without knowing ahead of time where to look for it. SCALE provides mechanisms by which content is replicated throughout the network by organically caching content as it transits through the network or prepopulating content caches for existing content. SCALE provides a distributed index based on multi-node resolution, in which nodes dynamically take on responsibility for subsets of the content index based solely on being in a particular geographic location. We provide an evaluation of SCALE's mechanisms for providing local content discovery and sharing based on a SCALE prototype running on Android devices. These results show that SCALE can improve the probability that content is available locally and decrease the number of hops needed to access content. Dynamic ad hoc content sharing apps (e.g. social networking, microblogging, photo sharing, search, chat channels, etc.) can be built on top of SCALE to provide enhanced situation awareness and command and control operations for mobile tactical users.