Widely Distributed C~4ISR

摘要

Advances in networking and communications make the dream of a highly connected mobile war fighter, persistent networked sensors, and distributed command and control a reality. However, being able to communicate is only the first part of the problem. The ability to easily communicate with a wide variety of highly distributed sensors and systems presents significant new problems that need to be addressed. First, an application must discover what services are available and establish communications with the desired services. Secondly, time synchronization across all of the networked systems is critical to correctly correlating the information into a coherent picture. In addition, maintaining data consistency in a highly distributed environment is an extremely challenging problem. Given the amount of data available clients must be able to subscribe to specific data in order to avoid information/system overload. Finally the information must be presented to the user in a form and on a platform well suited to the task at hand. All of these problems, and many more, must be solved in order to deliver a truly effective net-centric C4ISR system. A software architecture will be presented that attempts to solve the issues described above. The architecture inherently includes many features designed to address these issues. In addition, the user can select data from a wide variety of services, both local and remote and control how it is accessed, processed, and displayed. A detailed analysis of each of these techniques and how it impacts the effectiveness of the system will be discussed.