Approach towards achieving an interoperable C4ISR infrastructure

Coalition or Joint Forces operations involving multiple countries utilizing Net-Centric Warfare (NCW) is the need and trend of the modern battlefield. These heterogeneous forces have heterogeneous equipments adhering to their country's standards and specifications. This pushes for systems-of-systems interoperability to allow multinational manning of platforms operating within a combined command structure. The next generation coalition environment requires sharing of equipment, data and resources using an interoperable command, control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) infrastructure. The evolution of military sensor technologies at an unprecedented rate requires the use of various existing sub-systems, Commercial off-the-Shelf (COTS) as well as Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors due their inherent advantages. The data from these entities needs to be exchanged flawlessly so that the best Common Operational Picture (COP) of the battlefield can be presented to the command structure for taking the correct action. In this paper, we present an approach towards achieving programmatic, constructional and operational interoperabilty for NATO C4ISR infrastructure using the NATO Generic Vehicle Architecture (NGVA), Robotics and Autonomous Systems Ground (RAS-G) Interoperability Profiles (IOPs) and Multilateral Interoperability Programme (MIP) standards to support the future coalition battlefields. It allows the NATO military land system vehicles to be able to exchange control and command with the Unmanned Vehicles (UxVs) in turn, allow the exchange of data with higher echelons like command centres without any dependencies and bottlenecks.