Panorama - pervasive networking architecture for multimedia transmission in battlefield environments

Transmitting heavy multimedia traffic such as video over tactical environments has always been an elusive requirement for the army. Dissemination of battle zone mapping in real-time from the theater of operations and consequent integration of these video maps could help the higher levels of command and control have a panoramic view of the battle zone. In turn, this information could help them make appropriate strategies of war. However, devices deployed in the theater of operations are generally thin clients that do not possess the capability to transmit bulky multimedia data over wide ranges of geographic coverage. To deal with this issue, we propose a wireless overlay framework called Panorama. In this framework, certain nodes in the combat area, denoted as prime nodes (PN), form an overlay network called the envelope layer. The PN, which are capable of content processing and transcoding, interact with each other over the overlay and work in collaboration to transmit multimedia data over bottleneck links. In affect, these nodes act as indispensable intermediaries for successful multimedia transmission in the battlefield. A performance evaluation of this methodology, with an emphasis on the features possessed by prime nodes in the envelope layer, reveals that it functions very well for multimedia data transmission.