ICEMAN: A System for Efficient, Robust and Secure Situational Awareness at the Network Edge

Abstract

Situational awareness applications in disaster response and tactical scenarios require efficient communication without a managed infrastructure. In principle, the performance, size, weight, and power of commercial off-the-shelf mobile phones and tablets are sufficient to support such applications, provided that efficient protocols and mechanisms are put in place for the efficient and secure sharing and storage of content among such devices. ICEMAN (Information CEntric Mobile Ad-hoc Networking) is a system that allows applications to request content objects by their attributes, and integrates its API with utility-based dissemination, caching, and network-coding mechanisms to deliver content. ICEMAN is implemented based on the Haggle architecture running in the Android operating system, and supports distributed situational-awareness applications operating in networks subject to severe disruption. Its functionality is described, and performance results of the ICEMAN implementation running in mobile phones and the CORE/EMANE network emulation are presented for several test scenarios.