Broker Wars: Alert‑Centric Pub/Sub for Tactical AR

Broker Wars: Alert‑Centric Pub/Sub for Tactical AR

GlassBus: Revolutionary Alert System for Tactical Augmented Reality

Texas City, Texas – September 19, 2025 – In a breakthrough for first responders and tactical operators, Benjamin J. Gilbert from Spectrcyde RF Quantum SCYTHE at College of the Mainland has introduced GlassBus, a priority-aware publish/subscribe (pub/sub) broker designed to transform radio-frequency (RF) situational awareness in augmented reality (AR) environments. Detailed in the new research paper “Broker Wars: Alert-Centric Pub/Sub for Tactical AR,” GlassBus addresses critical inefficiencies in traditional polling-based systems, delivering ultra-low latency alerts that could save lives in high-stakes scenarios.

The paper highlights how conventional RF-to-AR pipelines, while achieving sub-200 ms response times, struggle with bursty data from sources like enemy radar, drone telemetry, and casualty beacons. These bursts overwhelm polling architectures, leading to delays, energy waste, and missed critical events. GlassBus overcomes these challenges by decoupling producers and consumers, enabling real-time notifications with multi-level priority queues, configurable drop policies, and power-aware scheduling optimized for constrained wearables like smart glasses.

Key findings from Gilbert’s evaluation include:

Sub-50 ms median latency with over 15 concurrent subscribers, even handling bursts of 100+ alerts per second.
Resilience under extreme conditions, maintaining 73% delivery of critical alerts with 90% packet loss—typical in contested tactical networks—compared to just 31% for polling baselines.
A user study with 20 participants showing 38% faster response times (from 3.4s to 2.1s), 42% fewer false acknowledgments, and 22% lower cognitive workload, as measured by NASA-TLX scores.
23% reduction in power consumption, extending battery life for field deployments, with CPU utilization below 15% in normal operations.

“GlassBus represents a paradigm shift in tactical AR messaging, prioritizing life-critical alerts while ensuring efficiency on resource-limited devices,” said Benjamin J. Gilbert, lead researcher and author. “By open-sourcing our implementation and benchmarks, we’re empowering the community to build more resilient systems for medics, first responders, and safety operators who can’t afford delays in the field.”

Integrated with the RF-QUANTUM-SCYTHE suite, GlassBus supports topic-based subscriptions, back-pressure handling, and opportunistic forwarding for disconnected operations. It runs on commodity hardware like Jetson Xavier NX and Raspberry Pi 5, using lightweight protocols over UDP or Bluetooth LE. The system also incorporates privacy and security features, such as TLS 1.3 encryption and role-based access, to protect sensitive casualty data under HIPAA and OPSEC guidelines.

The open-source code and measurement framework are available on GitHub at github.com/bgilbert1984/glassbus-benchmarks, inviting reproducible evaluations and further innovations in real-time AR systems.

This research underscores the practical impact of GlassBus, potentially improving survival rates in urban search-and-rescue by 15-20% through faster alert acknowledgment. It also opens commercial opportunities for defense contractors and equipment vendors to integrate resilient pub/sub middleware into next-generation AR platforms.

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About College of the Mainland
College of the Mainland is a comprehensive community college in Texas City, Texas, dedicated to providing accessible, high-quality education and fostering innovation in fields like technology, health sciences, and public safety. Through partnerships like Spectrcyde RF Quantum SCYTHE, COM advances research that addresses real-world challenges.

Media Contact:
Benjamin J. Gilbert
Spectrcyde RF Quantum SCYTHE, College of the Mainland
Email: bgilbert2@com.edu
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-2298-6538

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