Position, navigation, and timing in the Common Operating Environment: Prototyping the PNT User equipment Modernization Architecture

Recent trends within the US military seek to leverage the rapid pace of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) platforms for military use. The US Army in particular has started efforts to define a Common Operating Environment (COE) that establishes standards and architectures allowing for a high degree of modularity and enabling hardware-agnostic software development. To reduce development costs and time to deploy systems, the COE aims to make use of COTS components when possible, integrating custom and military-off-the-shelf components as necessary. To accomplish its goals effectively, the COE must enable software developers with a uniform method of access to important resources including communications links, military standard data formats, and positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) information. In support of the US Army Product Director, Position Navigation and Timing (PD PNT) as a part of the Military GPS User Equipment (MGUE) program, The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) has specified and prototyped the interfaces and infrastructure for PNT-enabled applications on a COTS device running the stock Android® Operating System (OS) to communicate with a military-grade PNT device. This work proposes and demonstrates Application Programming Interfaces (API) by which applications can access PNT information and an Interface Control Document (ICD) for communications with a PNT device as a baseline for the PNT portion of the COE-Handheld computing environment (CE). This paper discusses four aspects of the work: a PNT API, a device-to-handheld ICD, a prototype implementation of the Android® services and PNT device software, and a demonstration of applications using the API. An additional task to prototype an enclosure for the external device also supported this work but is not discussed here. The prototype implementation successfully demonstrated Android® applications using PNT data from external precise positioning service (PPS) receivers.