Cascade: Content Access System For The Combat-Agile Distributed Environment

Military dismounted communications are critical to the success of missions and safety of soldiers, and hence are strongly regimented and hierarchical. Certain situational awareness apps have been introduced, where content is exchanged between soldiers in a squad, but soldiers primarily carry any needed content out with them and bring any collected content back to base. Furthermore, soldiers rarely share content among themselves or with other squads, and any readily needed content must be retrieved through an expensive "reachback" link to base. We present CASCADE, a content-centric networking architecture that facilitates generation and dissemination of content based on soldiers' interests, both statically assigned (e.g., specialty within the squad) and dynamically discovered (i.e., derived from context). The key enabling abstraction within a CASCADE network is the concept of communities. Through the use of both topological and interest-based communities, CASCADE is able to quickly and efficiently deliver content, even in environments prone to disruption.