Overview
Over the summer, Geon Technologies collaborated with Technology Management Associates Incorporated (TMA) on an internal research and development project to integrate REDHAWK sensors into the JICD network. The goal of the REDHAWK JICD integration is to allow REDHAWK developers and maintainers of REDHAWK intellectual property to expose their assets to an existing JICD 4.2 network for use by the system. Adding a new REDHAWK sensor means more assets available to the tactical system. The short-term milestone was to provide status to an AppGEO system from a REDHAWK component about the running assets in a live REDHAWK Domain.
To leverage the power of JICD 4.2 networks, assets must adhere to the JICD messaging protocol and XML schemas. There are many existing REDHAWK assets that could be utilized effectively inside of a JICD 4.2 environment and the associated CONOPs. By attaching a REDHAWK sensor to the JICD network, AppGEO users can leverage these assets to perform collection and processing as needed for the mission.
Current Capabilities
The existing work has generated extra tooling in the REDHAWK code generators that creates a JICD 4.2 compliant REDHAWK component. This unique type of component provides all the necessary hooks to reach into a JICD 4.2 environment and expose the REDHAWK assets in that component’s domain. These hooks live inside of a custom Java component base class that can communicate with an AppGEO system described above. Of the AppGEO core services available, we have provided the necessary code inside of our REDHAWK component to utilize their Status service. This service publishes status messages encompassing AppGEO platforms, devices, and processors to all subscribed clients. We have also developed an archiving waveform that saves snapshots of data that could later be requested by a JICD client.
Future Enhancements
The next step towards further JICD integration is to first integrate the ability to view a stream of data from the AppGEO GUI. This can be accomplished by hooking a REDHAWK stream of the desired asset into a JICD stream that is linked to the AppGEO resource. Next, we will integrate command and control of REDHAWK assets from the AppGEO GUI. This would ensure that users of a JICD system can target REDHAWK specific assets as desired for their CONOP. This includes tasking such collector allocation, tuning, and de-allocation. Lastly, we will provide data file transfers from REDHAWK to other AppGEO clients based upon desired signal information and dwell time. This would extend the features of the archiving waveform that has previously been developed.
