Comparative study of middleware for C4I systems Web Services vis-à-vis Data Distribution Service

The Command, Control, Communications, Computer and Intelligence (C4I) systems provide battlefield information for the commanders to make decisions, and to control the military forces to accomplish missions. These systems were based on static architectures to ensure high dependability, support for real-time constraints and were mission specific. However, these systems lacked the dynamic features provided by recent advances in information technology. C4I systems require that both the feature sets of static and dynamic approaches be made available to ensure dependability, real-time support, facilitating reusability and interoperability. Web Services based on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the most popular middleware used in Enterprises today. Another middleware which is becoming popular is Data Distribution Service (DDS) based on Data-Centric Publish Subscribe Infrastructure. Recent advances in both the approaches have made them competitive for implementation in C4I systems for integrating its elements. Both the approaches need to be evaluated considering the system requirements of military communications. This paper carries out a comparative study of the two middleware solutions for integrating C4I system of a weapon system deployed in modern battlefields. In this paper, we present possible solutions and remaining challenges on the way towards realizing seamless information exchange for a weapon system.