Mobile Tactical Force Situational Awareness: Evaluation of Message Broker Middleware for Information Exchange

Situational Awareness (SA) is an important aspect of Command and Control, and a key enabler for military sovereignty. It is a critical element for the development of mission command capabilities. Developing SA requires information exchange between a tactical force's elements, including in a mobile scenario. We propose the use of the publish/subscribe paradigm to achieve this. In this paper, we present our experiments in the evaluation of two publish/subscribe mechanisms - based on Web Services Notification (WS-N) and Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) - applied to a realistic military scenario. Our analysis concluded that WS- N requires more network resources than MQTT to achieve the same functionality. According to our assessment, MQTT was the superior protocol. Furthermore, our evaluation showed that used network protocols, specifically OLSR and TCP, also play a significant role regarding the high use of network resources. In a mobile tactical environment, where network resources are scarce, it is recommended, as future work, to investigate optimisations or even alternative protocols that are better suited for this type of environments