Modeling and simulation of situational awareness in the tactical internet

One of the important functions of the US Army´s tactical internet (TI) is to improve battlefield awareness for individual units. Knowing the positions of friendly and enemy units to an acceptable degree of accuracy not only reduces the likelihood of fratricide but also provides beneficial information for planning and strategy. This knowledge is called situational awareness (SA) and is gained through the transmission and relaying of position information among networks of friendly units. Such networks require a complex framework of communication systems that provides reliable and efficient data transmission. This framework is known as an SA architecture. The FBCB2 DBCM Modeling and Simulation team have incorporated a set of communication system measures of effectiveness into the SA architecture model that have assisted designers in determining the tradeoffs of different SA architectures. This set of communication system measures of effectiveness includes traditional statistics such as end-to-end delay and throughput; however, these measures are not necessarily sufficient when assessing the quality of the SA picture. New measures of effectiveness are needed for this purpose. This paper discusses these new measures of effectiveness and the modeling and simulation techniques used to evaluate SA architectures