Distributed multi-platform fusion for enhanced radar management

Today's radars exhibit tremendous capacity to detect, locate, track and even provide the basis for identifying targets. However, these capabilities come with a price. Higher resolution means increased processing requirements, and generally smaller regional coverage. Also the complex behavior of some targets requires the judicial prediction of the "right" radar mode for continued observance of the target. As such, the need for offboard cues from other platforms can be beneficial in selecting and prioritizing regions of activity and at the same time provide the basis for predicting the appropriate radar mode. Distributed fusion provides a fundamental structure for capitalizing on off-board sources as a means of improving on-board sensor resource management. Also, the synergistic use of overlapping and complementary data sources provides information that is otherwise not observable from individual sources. Many existing fusion systems use a centralized architecture by processing all data at a single fusion node. The availability of distributed computing and the need to deal with bigger problems, however will imply distributed fusion systems with multiple fusion nodes processing data from their own sensors and communicating with other nodes to improve upon the local results.