Base Component for Network-Based Service-Oriented C4ISR Systems

摘要

Network Centric Warfare poses new challenges to C4ISR systems: future systems must provide access to a homogenous information and service space for a broad spectrum of users whose computation and communication resources vary and whose location may change frequently. We propose a design schema for network-based, service-oriented C4ISR systems and present a base component upon which such systems can be built on. From a user's point of view, the base component provides access to all services (i.e., applications, information sources, etc.) relevant for the current mission. From a technical perspective, these services are software modules which are distributed in a network and interact via well-defined interfaces. A main feature of our base component is that it is load-scalable: if the communication capacity between a user device and the network is insufficient or degrades during an operation, the base component may react to the new situation by moving computational load from the network into the user device. Under certain circumstances this re- balancing of computational load reduces the required communication capacity so that the overall system maintains a tolerable level of operability.