Achieving open interoperability in tactical remoted systems with COTS technology

Interoperability between systems is increasingly important within the military community. Traditionally, many tactical systems have been implemented as self-contained entities, incapable or minimally capable of interoperation with systems of different versions, vendors, and military branches. This has certainly been true of remoted signals intelligence (SIGINT) systems. Custom protocols and architectures, unique to each system, have frequently been justified as necessary to meet operations requirements. The real-time sharing of resources or data between systems has not been feasible. This approach is costly and inflexible. This paper describes the approach taken by SRI International (SRI) to address this problem. Our goal was to define an interoperability architecture for remoted SIGINT systems; this architecture must be open and based on international standards and commercially available products. Key to our architecture is the use at the application layer of the ISO 9506 Manufacturing Message Specification (MMS) protocol standard for the control of remote devices. We validated our approach by implementing a demonstration system consisting primarily of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software products, within a testbed environment. The results of this effort have shown that open, interoperable systems can be developed with commercial technology, thereby reducing implementation effort and cost. The structure of this paper is as follows. First, we present an example of the problem of interoperability in tactical remoted systems, and specifically within tactical airborne SIGINT systems; we then present our method for solving this problem through the use of open COTS technology; and finally, we summarize the lessons learned from taking this approach