Peer to peer information management for tactical situation awareness systems

The dynamic nature of the network-centric battlefield, coupled with the extreme paucity of resources (bandwidth, power, etc.) in the dismounted battlefield, presents a set of unique challenges that are not adequately addressed by the digital situation awareness systems in use today. We describe a unique peer-to-peer situation awareness system that was developed as part of DARPA´s small unit operations situation awareness system (SUO/SAS). This architecture demonstrated between one to two orders of magnitude reduction in the bandwidth utilized to provide effective situation awareness, and demonstrated the ability of a plan-aware system to minimize the cognitive load on the individual warfighters. We conclude with comments about the applicability of such architectures to the next generation of objective force C4ISR systems.