Adaptive Gravitational Gossip in Monitoring the Joint Battlespace Infosphere

Future USAF operations will be heavily dependent on having the "right information" at the "right time", and Joint Battlespace Infospheres (JBIs) are poised to fill that role. To do this, JBIs must be ubiquitous-always accessible, secure and responsive. Of all the literature written regarding JBIs, the most important problem to solve in order to make JBIs work in mobile scenarios are scalability, reliability and adaptability to changing battlefield conditions. This paper explores the use of SBCast, a novel adaptive probabilistic protocol, a delivery mechanism for JBI updates and as a possible solution towards guaranteeing these qualities. It documents tests of SBCast within a simulation environment configured with parameters based on actual military field operations. From these tests, the paper examines SBCast as an enhancer to JBI's ability for overcoming transient network failures while managing different classes of subscribers by available bandwidth and priorities. By using the feedback from SBCast as a middleware layer controller, JBIs would be able to "dial up" traffic for parts of the network and "dial down" traffic in others based on dynamic changes in network congestion or traffic demands.