Managing information sharing in tactical environments

Sharing and reliable dissemination of information in future battlefield environments will present unprecedented Information Management (IM challenges. The expected proliferation of airborne tactical sensors and non-traditional Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance (ISR) assets will introduce exceptional volumes of data into the battle space. The emergence of tactical radios that support wireless Internet Protocol (IP), and improved bandwidth and processing resources will fundamentally change the way that our war fighters and systems process and share information. It is essential that hardware and software approaches to manage this data, and reliably disseminate it to the war fighter are developed to address these emerging challenges. This is the focus of Aer, an AFRL internal project that is researching, developing, and testing information management (IM) approaches with this set of tactical challenges in mind The Aer capabilities are intended for deployment on Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). This paper discusses the research we are conducting to evaluate representative UAS hardware coupled with a tactical information management software prototype ccodenamed "Dino" within the mission-level context of the Aer project. The initial results of our research will be presented and future research directions will be outlined.