NET-CENTRICITY – WHERE IS THE DATA?

The U.S. military has made substantial progress in developing and fielding C4ISR systems that can collect and gather overwhelming amounts of valuable raw sensor data. The problem that comes along with this plethora of data is how can the U.S. military determine what methods are effective to distribute, access, and transform the data into knowledge or actionable information in an environment with transient or low-bandwidth networking. There are so many dynamics that can be manipulated that it is sometimes difficult to determine if a proposed system or approach is solving a problem or simply adding to the problem. This paper will present a simulation architecture that has been developed that allows platform level components to be integrated into an end-to-end operational thread with the ability to collect metrics for the purpose of determining measures of effectiveness.