Toward consistent snapshot of the digitized battlefield
Susanta P. Sarkar, Paul C. Richardson, L. Sieh · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1999
A battlefield can be viewed as a collection of entities, enemy and friendly, during combat, each entity scans its surrounding with local sensors to be aware of the current situation. Through digitation of the battlefield, it is possible to share this locally sensed information among all the friendly entities. Significant war-fighting advantages can be realized, if this shared information is consistent. During one of the soldier-in-the-loop simulation exercises invovling ground-based enemy and friendly entities, it was found that achieving consistent snapshot at each friendly node is not a trivial problem. A few contributing factors are: suitable method for combining individual perspective to a global one, mode of communication, movement of all entities, different local perspective of each entity, sensor calibration, fault, and clock synchronization. At the US Army VETRONICS Technology Center, we are in the process of developing a family of algorithms capable of obtaining a consistent global picture invovling one of the critical properties, ground position of entities. In the first stage we have established that for point to point communicating entities, a vector clock based scheme uses fewer number of messages and arrives at the global picture earlier. However, this result does not scale to broadcast situations.