Realistic Communications Effects for Evaluation of Tactical Command and Control and Situational Awareness applications

The concept of Live Virtual Constructive testing (LVC) is a central tenet for Operational Test Commands BCNIS program, which will provide realistic situational awareness (SA) and command and control (C2) tactical environment to support operational testing of future communication assets, without the costs and constraints of deploying a large number of physical units in the field. The goal of this SBIR is to research solutions for open issues in the areas of instrumentation, data collection and interface fidelity of the LVC representations, and provide a set of LVC capabilities, denoted as LVC-CF, that can be used to represent the current force communication networks under test. In Phase 1 of this SBIR effort, SNT conducted research to identify the requirements and concept of operations for such an LVC environment from the interface, data collection & analysis perspectives. We also identified approaches to incorporate current force communications in a LVC environment and developed preliminary designs for the LVC-CF framework. In Phase 2, SNT will complete the design and implement a prototype of the LVC-CF solution based on the Phase 1 findings and demonstrate its applicability for potential use in both JTRS and IBCT test events.