Delay-tolerant data sharing in tactical environments

Personnel operating in tactical environments heavily rely on information sharing to perform their missions. Solutions deployed in these environments need to focus on reliability and performance, in addition to usability to work as unattended as possible due to the often chaotic nature of operations. In this paper we propose a solution for delay-tolerant data sharing, in particular file sharing, using well supported, common networking protocols. The solution is based on the concept of broadcatching, which combines a delay-tolerant protocol such as BitTorrent with a publish/subscribe mechanism such as RSS to enable “many to one” information sharing. Experimental data shows that it is a promising approach for enabling reliable, mostly unattended data sharing on tactical networks in tactical environments.