Building robust and decentralized tactical name services with JXTA: Performance issues and solutions

Discovering tactical resources (a.k.a. name service or service discovery) in a robust, decentralized, and scalable fashion is critical for the success of tactical communications, particularly in dismounted segments consisting of dismounted soldiers/sensors and mounted segments formed by combat and support vehicles, combat Headquarters (HQ) and Command Post (CP). JXTA-the de facto standard of P2P programming frameworks-offers a promising open-source technology for building such a tactical name service. However, since JXTA is primarily built for Internet based P2P applications, we face several challenging issues in adapting this open-source technology to tactical networks for the tactical name service. In this paper, we identify algorithmic deficiencies in the JXTA 2.0 reference implementation and propose novel algorithms to overcome the deficiencies in tactical networks. We show through simulation that the proposed algorithms achieve much better lookup performance and consume lower bandwidth than the ones implemented in the JXTA 2.0 reference implementation under tactical networking scenarios.