Fiscal Year	2024
Division	NPS Naval Research Program
Department	Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
Investigator(s)	Jihane Mimih James W Scrofani
Sponsor	NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary	One of the main and ongoing challenges that our Navy faces is its ability to maintain continuous custody of maritime objects of interest such as our adversaries¿ platforms, sensors, and weapon systems across all domains of conflict in support of distributed maritime operations (DMO). DMO is an operational concept that enables widely dispersed naval units to perform sensing, command and control, and weapon activities such that the distributed platforms act as a coherent whole. All-domain intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting (ISRT) requires a network to enable widely dispersed sensors to perform data fusion and processing that enables the exchange, correlation, and combination of sensor data to provide a complete understanding of the operational picture to the stakeholders and to provide targeting information for long-range engagement as required by DMO. DMO therefore relies on networked sensing, data transfer and communications (the SDA¿s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture) to optimize the dynamic assignment of sensors to targets within the tasking, collection, processing, exploitation, and dissemination (TCPED) seabed-to-space sensor network. This dependence unfortunately makes us vulnerable to adversarial attacks who can attempt to degrade, disrupt and/or destroy our capability to observe and relay digital data in a disrupted, disconnected, intermittent and limited or low-bandwidth (D-DIL) environment. We propose to study the potential role of using the proliferation of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations (both earth observation and digital communication) to mitigate risks to adversary efforts to degrade Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) in a Contested Environment in DMO and Joint operations. The objective of this research is to evaluate the methods to increase the robustness of space sensing and network relay by orchestrating commercial and DoD satellite constellations.
Keywords	LEO communication constellation, LEO earth observation constellation, Robust Network, Contested Environment, Distributed Maritime Operations, DMO, Command & Control, C2 countermeasures, D-DIL, JADC2
Publications	Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data	Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal