Real-Time Littoral Propagation Modeling Technique

The growing threat to Navy ships from low flyers, coupled with the increasing importance of brown watery, littoral, scenarios in Navy planning, heightens the need for high fidelity propagation modeling. Such modeling is essential not only to the understanding of ship's sensors performance, but also for the assessment of threat behavior - e.g., RF missile seekers. Traditional propagation models used within the Navy community are valid only for a standard atmosphere, and homogeneous sea environment. New propagation models, which account for terrain and non-standard propagation conditions are far more complex and computationally intensive. To overcome the throughput hurdle within the context of real-time sensor/environment simulations, TSC is proposing to extend an existing interpolative scheme. It is supported by the off-line generation of mass stored propagation databases using existing high fidelity models. During a simulation run, propagation is modeled via interpolation algorithms relative to a database segment loaded into random access memory during initialization. This approach can bring high fidelity propagation modeling, under any environmental condition, into the real-time simulation world. It will also decouple the on-line simulation software from the propagation models specifics.