Network Aware Tactical Collaborative Environments

The implications of using mobile wireless communications are significant for emerging peer-to-peer (P2P) collaborative environments. From a networking perspective, the use of wireless technologies to support collaboration may impact bandwidth and spectrum utilization. This paper explores these network effects and describes an agent-based solution for providing feedback to system users regarding wireless P2P network behavior on the performance of collaboration support applications. We refer to this operational feedback as "network awareness." The underlying premise is that providing feedback on the status of the network will enable users to self-organize their behavior to maintain quality of data sharing. Results achieved during experiments conducted at the Naval Postgraduate School demonstrate significant effects of network behavior on application sharing performance and integration with client-server applications. A solution for improving network aware P2P collaboration, identified during the experiment, is discussed.