Architectural considerations for a family of multi-functional tactical intelligence terminals

Warfighters across the military operations continuum require timely and accurate information to successfully execute their missions. They employ intelligence data in direct support of command and control, weapons and sensors. As tactical intelligence terminals migrate toward a multi-band, multi-channel and multi-mission architecture, a dilemma exists when trying to satisfy jointly the conflicting intelligence broadcast needs of the small, highly-mobile, tactical user and the needs of the large, mobile or fixed command center. Each user has distinct, differing, mission and platform constraints. Offering the same weight, cost, size, transmit/receive channel functionality, and COTS/NDI solution for both cases is not the optimum solution for either. The highly-mobile tactical user requires a compact, environmentally robust terminal containing embedded message processing, sized sufficiently to his needs, but not so large as to meet the intensive filtering information needs of the command post. The command post, on the other hand, requires environmental robustness only on the military-specific portion of the terminal, i.e. the RF and INFOSEC segments. Computative-intense message processing is best handled in the inhabited cabin or below deck of the command post, where the operator workstation uses evolutionary COTS upgrades. Each of the intelligence terminal interfaces (mission, platform, RF band, correlation, filtering, and formatting, TDP, environmental, and power source) is examined to show that there is a natural division between the two user-types. Unity is best achieved by the use of use of a common set of modules populated in different terminals