A commercial approach to successful persistent radar surveillance of sea, air and land along the northern border

The benefits of a commercial approach to the deployment of radar surveillance along the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway System (GLSLSS) is discussed. Surveillance solutions must be multi-mission suitable, scalable, flexible, maintainable, upgradeable, interoperable, shareable, and affordable. This flexibility is fundamental to successfully leveraging tomorrow, investments made today in order to keep up with changing threats and technology. Not only can homeland security surveillance solutions benefit by leveraging commercial technologies, but non-sensitive target information, can drive significant human and commercial benefits. The paper presents a radar surveillance framework whose network architecture, COTS components, specially designed components and open interfaces are discussed. The modular nature of the framework includes software definable algorithms for acquisition of sea, air or land targets of interest, built-in integration of target information that fully scales in support of wide-area surveillance, and open interfaces in support of new, multi-mission situational awareness applications.