Task allocation for integrated tactical data links

Tactical data link (TDL) system is designed to meet the needs of military users for reliable, accurate and timely tactical information. With the development of communications technology, various TDLs are introduced to meet the different requirements of manifold tactical tasks. Each TDL is specified by hardware/software characteristics (e.g., waveform, modulation, data rates, transmission media, etc.) as well as by message and protocol standards. The different respective requirements and the technological gaps between TDLs make data exchange through them be hardly achieved, which means that tactical interoperability among the participants in different Data Link Networks is not guaranteed. There is an urgent need to achieve the cooperation and compatibility to improve the performance of data exchange. The key factor to improve the interoperability among different TDLs is the platforms that support multiple TDLs. They are responsible to convert the data format among different standards and allocate tasks among diverse TDLs. In this paper, we focus on optimizing the task allocation among diverse TDLs. A set of pre-defined tasks need to be assigned to different TDLs with resource constraints before execution. This paper presents a task allocation algorithm for integrated TDL systems based on the principles of particle swarm optimization (PSO). It tries to find the optimal task assignment that maximize the number of task in one TDL and minimize the cost of format conversion among different TDL standards. The algorithm guarantees that all the real-time tasks in the platform can meet their deadlines, and the pre-allocated bandwidth will not exceed the capability of the TDL. Experimental results manifest the validity of the algorithm.