Use of Presence and Location Information for Situational Awareness

This paper describes a model for applying presence for situation awareness by combining presence publications from various sources with other data, retrieved from for example sensors. Using new technology in conjunction with presence and location information, situational awareness can be considerably improved. Furthermore, it is studied how these concepts can be applied in urban operations. Location information, which may be included as extended presence information, is usually obtained from satellites, but in dense urban areas and particularly indoors, this is not possible. Thus, positioning methods based on mobile networks, radio frequency identification (RFID) and Wireless local area network (WLAN) are proposed for complementing the satellite based ones, even if their use may be quite limited. The work is a part of a study on how to apply Next Generation (Mobile) Network (NGN/NGMN) technology in military ad hoc network environments. There are also competing standards for presence, but because of easier integration with other services, and the inclusion of geographical data, this work concentrates on the use of the SIMPLE specifications session initiation protocol for instant messaging and presence leveraging extensions. Security aspects of the environment are considered. Both Internet and internet protocol multimedia substructure (IMS) network environment are studied. The proposed model for situation awareness reuses to a great extent the upcoming standardized presence services.