Planning for Communication Resources

Abstract

For many human team activities, ranging from military operations through to emergency rescue or large entertainment events, communications resources must be assigned to different teams or team members. These assignments must reflect the capabilities of the available communication devices and avoid conflicting use of communications channels already in use in the local environment. In general, finding and assigning available communication channels for short-term use is a task performed manually by human operators. Operators, using generic tools, such as spreadsheets and database manipulation programs, access government databases to obtain information on frequency usage and then manually attempt to locate suitable unused channels. This process is time intensive, prone to error, and 'mechanistic' in nature. In this paper, we describe the CommPlanner, a new fully implemented system developed to automate this assignment procedure and thereby speed up and make more reliable the process. We describe the algorithms used by the CommPlanner, and the underlying issues that, while not always obvious, must be addressed in the processes of assigning frequency usage.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 2003
Accession Number
ADA460985

Entities

People

  • Brett Browning
  • Manuela M. Veloso

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force Research Laboratories
  • Bandwidth
  • Communication Channels
  • Computer Science
  • Databases
  • Frequency
  • Frequency Bands
  • Geographic Regions
  • Governments
  • Information Operations
  • Line Of Sight
  • Local Governments
  • Military Applications
  • Military Operations
  • Operating Systems
  • Spread Spectrum
  • Transmitters

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Systems Analysis and Design