Creating a dynamic picture of network participant geospatial information in complex terrains

Strategic, operational and tactical information, combat identification and blue-force-tracking provided by advanced "command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance" distributed system-of-systems improve the quality of decision-makers' situation awareness (SA). Such SA improvements increase the pace at which decision making can be done while maintaining a low risk of errors by decreasing the friction (the fog of war) in today's complex geopolitical contexts often conducted in urbanized areas. The first challenge addressed by this paper relates to generating accurate geolocation of agents even where satellite-positioning systems, such as the Global Positioning System, are unreliable or denied. The second challenge concerns the efficient sharing of this information for mobile agents in complex terrains by using advanced mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) technologies. The last challenge addressed consists in devising a set of rules based on a dead-reckoning error model for controlling the positional- data updates shared over the MANET.