Using MQTT to support mobile tactical force situational awareness

In this paper, we investigate the publish/subscribe standard Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) with respect to its application in the tactical domain. We leverage open source software to generate a testbed for controlled and repeatable experiments. The work has been performed in the context of the NATO CSO/IST-150 “NATO Core Services profiling for Hybrid Tactical Networks” group. Our findings highlight that MQTT is a lightweight approach to publish/subscribe in general, which warrants future, more elaborate experiments with the protocol applied to the tactical domain. Our experiments relied on a central, cloud-deployed MQTT broker. However, this broker-based nature of MQTT is problematic in disruptive environments (e.g., single point of failure in case of link loss to cloud), and so measures to mitigate this effect should be investigated further (e.g., using broker federation and tactical cloudlets).