Intelligent information dissemination services in hybrid satellite-wireless networks

Abstract

The need for rapid deployment and user mobility suggest the use of a hybrid satellitedwireless network infrastructure for important situation awareness and emergency response applications. An Intelligent Information Dissemination Service lIIDSr has been developed to support the dissemination and maintenance of extended situation awareness throughout such a network information infrastructure in a seamless manner. One of the goals of IIDS is to transparently handle the mismatches in characteristics of satellite and terrestrial wireless networks, allow effective utilization of available bandwidth, and support timely delivery of highly relevant information. IIDS achieves the above by implementing user profile aggregation that incrementally aggregates users into communities sharing common interests to enable multicastdbased information dissemination. Based on the user grouping, semantic profile matching customizes information streams based on matching user group interest profiles. By taking into account expected changes in user profiles, profiledoriented data dissemination achieves predictive push and caching that anticipates future user needs and minimizes latency of data request by making data available before they are explicitly requested. Finally, bandwidthdaware filtering adapts information streams to resource bandwidth availability to gracefully hide the bandwidth mismatch between the satellite and wireless links in the hybrid network infrastructure. The IIDS software has been deployed on the Digital Wireless Battlefield Network lDWBNr that integrates commercial offdthedshelf satellite and wireless products into a heterogeneous satelliteswireless hybrid network for supporting wireless mobile multimedia services.