GEOGRAPHICAL BASED SITUATIONAL AWARENESS IN MILITARY MOBILE DOMAIN

摘要

In 2006 it became clear for the Royal Netherlands Army (RNLA) that the traditional concept for exchanging data in the mobile domain, based upon hierarchical radio nets, could not offer sufficient performance for the future Battlefield Management System (BMS). The C2 Support Centre, who develops the BMS, became aware of the insufficient performance through theoretical studies, lab experiments and field trials with currently used and various new radios. It also became clear that in the foreseeable future potential vendors of VHF radios could not offer radio's that provide the performance that was needed for the BMS system. These insights led to a concept where geographical related information is exchanged to all vehicles in the immediate vicinity, instead of through the traditional hierarchical way. The concept, which was named 'Geographical Based Situational Awareness' (GBSA) aims to maximize the situational awareness in all vehicles in a geographical area without the need for communication up and down the hierarchical command chain). The benefits of this approach are increased timeliness of information and a significant reduction of the amount of information communicated along the hierarchical lines. The main operational benefit is a significantly improved support for fratricide prevention due to more timely position reports. As a first step in the development of the GBSA concept the C2 Support Centre choose to develop an abstract of the concept for Position Updates only. It was decided to run tests with 50 nodes as an average in the network and to continue with a simulation with up to an estimated maximum of 200 nodes. This paper discusses the recent development aspects that led to the GBSA concept. It furthermore describes the developed software, performed lab experiments, and the modelling and performance simulation of the mobile Position Update (PU) system. Simulation studies indicate that the GBSA-PU system is flexible enough to maintain an awareness of the position of vehicles in their local environment. The characteristics of the GBSA-PU system, its current and foreseen development as well as its relation to the hierarchical networks will also be presented.