| The global context of this work is that of mobile ad hoc networks (MANets).
Operation fields often give rise to situations where communication has to be carried out without any infrastructure. The context, constraints and expectations in such fields of operation are as follows.
The network is organized as a multilevel communication architecture.
A few nodes in a small geographical area compose a MANet with high speed interconnexion
(100k to 10Mbps). At a higher level, some of these nodes can be linked with a global infrastructure such as a telecommunication network which provides wide area communication, the counterpart being a low transmission rate (1k to 100kbps). This is the basic architecture that can be assumed to be available in the near future for military on field equipments and thus applications.
In this overall context it is necessary to have services that still work in case the network is slow or even broken. We believe that it is important to study the conception of brand new applications, dedicated to that kind of networks. The application that
we present in this paper clearly falls in this category. Its major originalities are that is totally decentralized and that it handles what we call active information.
Active information are information that are modified, updated, by the different entities of the network. Applications that use active information have never been experimented in a military context.
Our application, which is the topic of this paper, makes it possible to share a map of the battlefield between soldiers. At the beginning, the map is owned by one single officer.
He can split it in different pieces that can be distributed to different groups or individual troopers.
Each group or individual is then in charge of updating the map with information that they can collect on the battlefield. The chief of a group can decide on further splitting the map between some of his soldiers. Soldiers or groups meeting on the battlefield can then communicate in a peer to peer manner to rebuilt partly updated versions of the whole map.
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