Simulation based evaluation of communications management within battle space scenarios

Technical developments to our work in the area of communications management in decentralised data fusion systems are described. These include combining identification and tracking sub-systems into a single simulator, and increasing the complexity of the sensing model, communication model, and target/platform trajectories. These technological developments are employed to indicate which is the most appropriate communications management philosophy: (i) one based on identification only, (ii) one based on tracking only, or (iii) one based on identification and tracking in combination. The paper concludes that, for the scenario investigated, communications management based purely on identification provides good identification performance but poor track performance. The converse was true when the management was based purely on track information. However, when the communication management decision philosophy was based on both identification and track, good performance in both sub-systems was achieved.