Introduction

Transmitting heavy multimedia traffic such as video over tactical environments has always been an elusive requirement for the army. Dissemination of battle zone mapping in real-time from the theater of operations and consequent integration of these video maps could help the higher levels of command and control have a panoramic view of the battle zone. In turn, this information could help them make appropriate strategies of war. However, devices deployed in the theater of operations are generally thin clients that do not possess the capability to transmit bulky multimedia data over wide ranges of geographic coverage. To deal with this issue, we propose a wireless overlay framework called Panorama. In this framework, certain nodes in the combat area, denoted as Prime Nodes (PN), form an overlay network called the Envelope Layer. The PNs, which are capable of content processing and transcoding, interact with each other over the overlay and work in collaboration to transmit multimedia data over bottleneck links. In affect, these nodes act as indispensable intermediaries for successful multimedia transmission in the battlefield. A performance evaluation of this methodology, with an emphasis on the features possessed by Prime Nodes in the Envelope Layer, reveals that it functions very well for multimedia data transmission.

In this project, we propose Panorama to address the aforementioned issue. Through Panorama, we evolve a strategy to transmit multimedia data from the lowest levels of command to levels up in the hierarchy. We facilitate the existing WIN-T architecture with novel features that support multimedia data transmission. We propose that certain nodes, denoted Prime Nodes, in the lowest tier of the architecture form an overlay network, called the Envelope Layer, transcode multimedia data and work in collaboration to transmit multimedia data over the battle space. Using simulations, we evaluate Panorama and its suitability for multimedia transfer in a battlefield environment.

 

This research work is supported by grants from:

National Science Foundation	Army Research Office	Microsoft Corporation