Towards efficient group management and communication for large-scale mobile applications

Applications such as fleet management and logistics, emergency response, public security and surveillance or mobile workforce management use geo-positioning and mobile networks as means of enabling real-time monitoring, communication and collaboration among a possibly large set of mobile nodes. The majority of those systems require real-time tracking of mobile nodes (e.g. vehicles, people or mobile robots), reliable communication to/from the nodes, as well as group communication among the mobile nodes. In this paper we describe a distributed middleware with focus on management of context-defined groups of mobile nodes, and group communication with large sets of nodes. We also present a prototype Fleet Tracking and Management system based on our middleware, give an example of how context-specific group communication can enhance the node's mutual awareness, and show initial performance results that indicate small overhead and latency of the group communication and management.