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

Abstract

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 utilitybased 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 1 .I. INTRODUCTION Tactical and emergency response scenarios require efficient, robust, and secure network communication to quickly deliver data for situational awareness applications. The dynamic and resource limited constraints in these networks require that nodes opportunistically communicate with limited global knowledge, and make efficient use of the scarce available bandwidth. However, despite the remarkable increase in sensing, storage, processing, and communication capabilities in mobile devices, efficient dissemination and storage of content on the volatile network edge remains a challenging research problem. This paper presents and evaluates the ICEMAN (Information-CEntric Mobile Ad-hoc Networking) system. ICEMAN is an information-centric system designed for situational awareness applications operating in networks subject to severe disruption.Considerable work has been done on information-centric networking [5] over the past few years. Section II summarizes this prior work and motivates some of the design choices made in ICEMAN.Section III summarizes the main functionality of ICEMAN, which uses a publish-subscribe paradigm like prior ICN approaches, but adopts a declarative attribute-based approach

Information-centric mobile caching network frameworks and caching optimization: a survey

“…ICMANET supports situational awareness applications at the tactical edge. Declarative Attribute-based Naming, network coding, utility-based content caching and symmetric encryption are used in ICMANET to provide efficient communication for multiple simultaneous classes of situational awareness traffic in the presence of severe disruptions to network connectivity [111].…”

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

“…In [40], we conducted an extensive evaluation of ICEMAN through emulation with CORE/EMANE [7] to understand the performance characteristics of different policies. We modeled a tactical network consisting of 30 nodes (3 squads of 10) with different classes of situational awareness traffic.…”

SOCRATIC: A social approach to network coding rate control

“…Periodic purging and refreshing of interests ensure that stale paths are discarded and that new paths are discovered. Recent work [2] has demonstrated the value of combining network coding, ICN [14] and DTN [5], using interest-based routing. In the ICEMAN system, network coding can achieve significant performance benefits over fragmentation [15].…”

“…Formally, interest predicates for node S are represented as a set of weighted attribute/value pairs, I(S) ✓ A ⇥ V ⇥ N, where A, V, and N denote the domains for attributes, values, and weights. We say that content C with weighted attributes M (C) satisfies interest I(S) for node S with a satisfaction degree (C, S) defined as in [2], where…”

“…Unlike previous approaches, SOCRATIC replicates a bounded number of network coded blocks according to the satisfaction degree of the data object and the potential relay, along with other social-context heuristics. We have implemented and evaluated SOCRATIC as an extension of the ICEMAN [2] system. Recent work demonstrates that the information centric networking (ICN) paradigm can improve content delivery and reduce latency in volatile networks [3], [4].…”