| In the area of sensor use for military and domestic border defense, the target sets in today’s Global War on Terror (GWOT) are vastly different than the large, high-tech targets employed by enemy nations. GWOT targets are largely low-tech, consisting of personnel on foot, on horseback and in small, motorized (SUV type) vehicles. There has been a need to address the evolving challenges faced in the GWOT through more advanced sensor networking, planning, tracking, and predictive capabilities, which has resulted in an increasing departure from accepted integration standards. Due to this departure, integrating new sensors into existing communications architectures and displaying integrated data in a useful, standardized format for end-users and decision makers has become more difficult.
This paper describes Predictive Universal Layered Sensor Exploitation Network (PULSENet), a solution to the problems inherent in tracking heterogeneous target sets and utilizing disparate sensor data. PULSENet addresses these problems by integrating disparate sensors and sensor data into a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) based on Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) web services. The SWE services provide standard interfaces to discover sensors, retrieve sensor observations, task sensors, and subscribe to and be notified of sensor alerts. Sensors and their data are described in common, XML-based formats: Sensor Model Language (SensorML) for sensor description and Observations and Measurements (O & M) for sensor data. PULSENet combines these standard services and formats for sensor data with existing OGC web services for map data to provide end-users with improved sensor data fusion, data mapping, and data mining capabilities and an enhanced Common Operating Picture (COP) for multiple target detection and tracking.
|