Patent ID: 7672281

Claim:
A method of sharing situational awareness information between nodes in a wireless communications network, each node being one of a plurality of node types, each node type being differentiated from other node types by non-communications characteristics of an entity associated with said each node, the network including a requesting node, the method comprising: a first node periodically transmitting a situational awareness message; a second node receiving the situational awareness message; the second node determining a distance from the first node to the second node; the second node re-transmitting the received situational awareness message when the first node is within a predetermined distance of the second node, the predetermined distance being dependent on the node type of the first node; the requesting node transmitting a situational awareness request to a set of nodes in the network; the nodes in the set of nodes transmitting a situational awareness response in response to the situational awareness request; and each node in the network upon receiving any situational awareness response, re-transmitting the response toward the requesting node.