Hot Diffusion—Information Management for Tactical Networks

ATCorp has developed an information management platform for tactical ad hoc networks. HotDiffusion is a peer-to-peer system in which information is replicated and dispersed among the network nodes. Hosts seeking information are thus likely to find it among their near neighbors in the network.

A process of controlled diffusion of information objects, together with replication and expiration, results in a steady-state (equilibrium) distribution of replicas. We developed purely local techniques to control these processes to robustly produce desired distributions – ones that correspond to information management goals. Information is retrieved by flooding a query outward to neighboring nodes in a small radius. Any objects that match the query in this flood disk are routed back.

We conducted simulations of HotDiffusion across a range of anticipated network conditions. These simulations showed that under certain very challenging conditions, HotDiffusion can outperform conventional (non-replicated) methods of information distribution. We implemented a prototype which runs on a small network of wireless nodes.