ICEMAN: A Practical Architecture for Situational Awareness at the Network Edge

Situational awareness applications used in disaster response and tactical scenarios require efficient communication without support from a fixed infrastructure. As commercial off-the-shelf mobile phones and tablets become cheaper, they are increasingly deployed in volatile ad-hoc environments. Despite wide use, networking in an efficient and distributed way remains as an active research area, and few implementation results on mobile devices exist. In these scenarios, where users both produce and consume sensed content, the network should efficiently match content to user interests without making any fixed infrastructure assumptions. We propose the ICEMAN (Information CEntric Mobile Adhoc Networking) architecture which is designed to support distributed situational awareness applications in tactical scenarios. We describe the motivation, features, and implementation of our architecture and briefly summarize the performance of this novel architecture.