Network-centric data fusion

The performance of three distributed sensor fusion network architectures is investigated: a fully-connected and a partially-connected measurement fusion system and a partially-connected track fusion system. The investigation employs an advanced military scenario generator, FLAMES(TM), which was customised for exercising a range of distributed data fusion experiments. Specifically, it includes a representative model of the delays in a communication system (such as JTIDS or Link 16). Here the delays were used to modify communication bandwidth and to evaluate how this affected the performance of the fusion architectures / algorithms. Under certain specific scenario conditions, it was found that decentralised measurement fusion system was severely affected by reduced bandwidth. This is because each node loads its communication buffer with every measurement and consequently some measurements are never transmitted. The decentralised track fusion system exhibits improved performance because it lumps measurements into tracks and thereby it makes much more effective use of the bandwidth. Moreover, it was found that the performance of the partially connected decentralised track fusion system was very close to the optimal performance achieved by the fully-connected decentralised measurement fusion system.