Guaranteed Data Integrity in the GIG-NCES Environment

Our approach is to implement data exchanges through an agent whose task is to optimize data consistency between platforms according to a function maximizing the value of critical data at the expense of secondary or tertiary data. With all elements of exchanged data ranked for their worth to the end user, a cost function may be implemented to allocate bandwidth resources according to the goal of maximizing the validity of high-priority data between ships. With an assumption of the available bandwidth between each platform in the network, the agent can selectively send or request data to maintain the most significant information the most accurate and consistent. A complete implementation of this concept requires (1) a mechanism to"tag"all data with the ranking (end-user value), (2) a consistent approach for how these tags are assigned, and (3) a communications design whereby point-to-point communications between applications are replaced with a single channel through which all exchanges can be controlled.