Content-Oriented Mobile Edge Technology System Integration Framework and Field Evaluation

In recent years, content-oriented networking has garnered extensive interest from both academia and industry as a potential direction for future Internet evolution. It is also a promising solution to address the challenging problem of on-time situational awareness for soldiers at the tactical edge, where network connectivity is often intermittent and limited in capacity. This paper presents the content-oriented mobile edge technology (COMET) system framework to integrate, test and evaluate the effectiveness of various content-oriented networking approaches for mobile edge networks. COMET is a unifying framework with two innovative system elements, content-oriented socket (co socket) and enhanced broadcast abstraction layer (EBAL). They support and integrate multiple approaches to content-oriented networking. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the COMET integration framework has been verified in large scale outdoor field experiments over a three-squad heterogeneous network including Rifleman tactical radios and WiFi links. Compared to the baseline network architecture currently being adopted by the military, a COMET integrated content-oriented solution recorded an average 27× reduction in content delivery latency while at the same time delivering 70% more content.