Geographical based Situational Awareness in Military Mobile Domain

In 2006 it became clear for the Royal Netherlands Army (RNLA) that the traditional concept for exchanging data in the mobile domain, based upon hierarchical radio nets, could not offer sufficient performance for the future Battlefield Management System¹ (BMS). The C2 Support Centre, who develops the BMS, became aware of the insufficient performance through theoretical studies, lab experiments and field trials with currently used and various new radios. It also became clear that in the foreseeable future potential vendors of VHF radios could not offer radio´s that provide the performance that was needed for the BMS system. These insights led to a concept where geographical related information is exchanged to all vehicles in the immediate vicinity, instead of through the traditional hierarchical way. The concept, which was named `Geographical Based Situational Awareness´ (GBSA) aims to maximize the situational awareness in all vehicles in a geographical area without the need for communication up and down the hierarchical command chain). The benefits of this approach are increased timeliness of information and a significant reduction of the amount of information communicated along the hierarchical lines. The main operational benefit is a significantly improved support for fratricide prevention due to more timely position reports. As a first step in the development of the GBSA concept the C2 Support Centre choose to develop an abstract of the concept for Position Updates only.