Small Unit Operations (SUO) Situation Awareness System

Situation Awareness Information in Small Unit Operations. U.S. military doctrine is rapidly changing emphasis from large mechanized forces to smaller, rapidly deployable units of five to ten soldiers. These small units must have access to highly tailored situation awareness information. The tactical information systems used by these units are based on small, handheld computers connected by wireless networks, and are subject to power limitations and intermittent connections.

In this project we defined a tactical information system architecture. Such a system is a distributed computation environment into which information flows from higher-echelon and legacy systems through defined interfaces. This information is cached at various nodes, processed to identify the nodes that need it, and transmitted to them. The system filters information according to need, displays situation-based information to the warfighters, and provides tools with which the warfighters can collaboratively respond to changing information.

Our system architecture is layered. At the bottom is the communications layer, which comprises the radio links connecting the distributed elements of the computation environment. The network layer ties the links together and manages the multihop connectivity between the elements. The information management layer mediates between applications running on the nodes and the instantaneous communications capability provided by the network. At the top, the applications layer contains the tools that the soldier uses to visualize and interact with the information. Spanning all layers are security and resource management.