Dissemination and storage of tactical unmanned aerial vehicle digital video imagery at the Army Brigade Level

Abstract

The Department of Defense Joint Technical Architecture has mandated a migration from analog to digital technology in the Command, Control, Communication, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) community. The Tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (TUAV) and Tactical Control System (TCS) are two brigade imagery intelligence systems that the Army will field within the next three years to achieve information superiority on the modern digital battlefield. These two systems provide the brigade commander with an imagery collection and processing capability never before deployed under brigade control. The deployment of the Warfighter Information Network (WIN), within three to five years, will ensure that a digital dissemination network is in place to handle the transmission bandwidth requirements of large digital video files. This thesis examines the storage and dissemination capabilities of this future brigade imagery system. It calculates a minimum digital! storage capacity requirement for the TCS Imagery Product Library, analyzes available storage media based on performance, and recommends a high capacity storage architecture based on modern high technology fault tolerance and performance. A video streaming technique is also recommended that utilizes the digital interconnectivity of the WIN for dissemination of video imagery throughout the brigade.