DISTRIBUTED CONTROL A CANDIDATE MILITARY COMSAT CONTROL SYSTEM

Abstract

Advanced Military Satellite Communications Systems providing communications capability supporting projected minimum essential military wartime communications that will accommodate force message distribution, force direction and force report back, and force/force or group-to-group communications. These dedicated communications resources must be continuously available to the wide variety of military users. It is necessary, therefore, that the command/control implementation of these systems be capable of (a) long-term resource allocation to fulfill user requirements with a minimum of delay and system overhead, and (b) insuring system capability to fulfill real-time users service requests. Anticipated operational use indicates that a considerable amount of day-to-day control will be required to coordinate the user access to communications, to provide communications for internal user network control, and to support routine system maintenance activities. This paper discusses a candidate centralized system management and distributed control framework that provides a system operations capability meeting the interconnection requirements needed for such a military type communications satellite system.