Emergency Communications C-COM, Hughes Boeing — GPS II-F ...

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MilsatMagazine — July/August 2011
coMMand center
automatically correlate and fuse the data. Processing data onboard
the UAS/UAV significantly reduces the amount of information
that is sent over wireless communication links, allowing for
improved speed of command and increased situational awareness.
MSM
When discussing military communications (satellite, ISR,
BLOS, COTM and so on), where do you see this technology
leading over the next few months?
Dr. DeBardelaben
With shrinking budgets and increasingly volatile asymmetric
threats facing the military, I see the DoD pushing towards the
establishment of open communication architectures with well
defined interfaces to maximize interoperability and reduce costs.
Commercial industry has extensively leveraged open architectures
to increase competition, increase innovation, and drastically
reduce costs. With standards committees defining communication
protocol stack interfaces, DoD vendors are encouraged to
specialize in developing specific communication components
to foster increased innovation, while lower costs by exploiting
economies of scale.
As more ISR assets enter the battlespace, bandwidth-constrained
satellite and BLOS reach-back communication links quickly
become single points of failure. Peer-to-peer (P2P) tactical
communication approaches have emerged as a viable means to
maintain situational awareness in an unreliable communication
environment. Applications such as Blue Force Tracking,
inter-squad communications, sensor network data fusion,
and unmanned vehicle control are well suited for future P2P
communications architectures.
Rapidly changing mission scenarios and conditions on the
battlefield will require cognitive functions across the communication
protocol stack. Future cognitive radio capabilities will better utilize
scarce spectrum and dynamically adapt network functions and
configurations based on the needs of the warfighter mission.