Experiment and field demonstration of serverless group communication

This paper presents a field experimentation and demonstration addressing serverless information services that provide both group messaging with ordering guarantees and robust file/media object sharing in a tactical edge communication environment. These serverless information services constitute the main functional components of our real time image and ordered annotation sharing application, called Tactigram. The purpose of Tactigram is to integrate serverless services in useful tool demonstrating the utility of real time information exchange to the warfighter. We show how a Group Communication Service (GCS) framework provides for quick exchange of small data, and tactical torrents (SISTO) provide for file sharing used by Tactigram. The demonstration was conducted as part of the Agile Bloodhound 2014 (AB14) field event. In accordance with AB14 use case scenarios, Android devices were used to exchange images and annotations over Soldier Radio Waveform (SRW) and WiFi MANETs in fully distributed manner. While the results obtained constitute a very preliminary evaluation of serverless group communication, the field test environment was very useful in highlighting critical design points (e.g., on-the-move dynamics) where enhancements of the protocol are needed.