An architecture to support information availability in the tactical domain

Access to information is critical to both the commander in an AOC and the warfighter in the field. Typically information is readily available at centralized command posts, however, at the tactical edge, resources are far more limited, making information dissemination a challenge. Targeting pods, already found mounted to the hardpoints of many tactical aircraft, provide a cost effective platform for making information available to tactical users. To this end, the Network-Centric Exploitation and Tracking (N-CET) program is designing, developing, and implementing a proof of concept architecture for pods that is net-centric, reconfigurable, and allows processing at the sensor. The approach taken to achieve these attributes is to embed processing and communications on the pod, and employ net-centric exploitation and fusion algorithms to distil information from high fidelity sensor data. Information Management services provide the interface between the sensors, processing, and network, disseminating information between algorithms, and prioritizing it as it goes out over the network. This paper provides an overview of the N-CET architecture and the sensors and net-centric algorithms integrated to evaluate the performance of the architecture through ground based experimentation.