|
The DARPA Battlefield Awareness and Data Dissemination (BADD) Phase II Program will provide the next generation multimedia information management architecture to support the warfighter. One goal of this architecture is proactive dissemination of information to the warfighter through strategies such as multicast and 'smart push and pull' designed to minimize latency and make maximum use of available communications bandwidth. Another goal is to support integration of information from widely distributed legacy repositories. This will enable the next generation of battlefield awareness applications to form a common operational view of the battlefield to aid joint service and/or multi-national peacekeeping forces. This paper discusses the approach we are taking to realize such an architecture for BADD. Our architecture and its implementation, known as the Distributed Dissemination Serivces (DDS) are based on two key concepts: a global database schema and an intelligent, proactive caching scheme. A global schema provides a common logical view of the information space in which the warfighter operates. This schema (or subsets of it) is shared by all warfighters through a distributed object database providing local access to all relevant metadata. This approach provides both scalability to a large number of warfighters, and it supports tethered as well as autonomous operations. By utilizing DDS information integration services that provide transparent access to legacy databases, related information from multiple 'stovepipe' systems are now available to battlefield awareness applications. The second key concept embedded in our architecture is an intelligent, hierarchical caching system supported by proactive dissemination management services which push both lightweight and heavyweight data such as imagery and video to warfighters based on their information profiles. The goal of this approach is to transparently and proactively stage data which is likely to be requested by the warfighter in caches which are physically close to the warfighter. Through a global schema and intelligent caching, the BADD DDS architecture will provide a virtual information repository in which warfighter access to information is both fast and transparent with respect to its original source.
|
