An open source situational awareness display for administering heterogeneous networks on the tactical edge

Abstract

Timely and accurate situational awareness is one of the key elements of any effective military campaign. As such, significant effort has been invested in the DoD to share location, blue force tracking, and other track data to enable commanders to make effective decisions. What has been less available are network and link visualization tools for network administrators at the tactical edge to quickly diagnose problems and assess the performance of highly intermittent networks. Although many radio systems have built-in proprietary tools that show connectivity diagrams, these tools are extremely difficult to adapt to other systems due to their closed nature. In this paper, we present a real-time open source network visualization tool for rapid network and link situational awareness on heterogeneous networks. Using widely available software such as Google Earth and various distribution systems, we show that network connectivity over several heterogeneous radio systems can be easily visualized to aid in decision making1.