University of Delaware
Office of Public Relations
The Messenger
Vol. 6, No. 1/1996
COMPUSOLDIER: THE FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE GOES DIGITAL

     It's 3 a.m. somewhere in a war zone in the year 2010. U.S.
soldiers under NATO command are advancing and about to cross a
river. Enemy fire is heavy; casualties are high; and there is
confusion about where to go. Then, the printer in each soldier's
vest produces a new terrain map with a safer route across enemy
territory. After orders are verbally relayed to each soldier,
troops begin to change direction. Soon, pencil-size cameras
lodged in their infrared, night-vision helmets send video images
back to command headquarters, giving strategists a real-time look
at the terrain to which they've just committed their troops. In
the meantime, sensors attached to wounded soldiers are sending
vital signs and exact locations back to command and medical
units.
     This scenario predicts how the foot soldier of the future
will function in battle, says Charles Boncelet, UD professor of
electrical engineering and a member of a research team working
with the U.S. Army on the digital soldier.
     The University's departments of Electrical Engineering and
of Computer and Information Sciences are involved in a consortium
of industry and academia recently awarded a five-year, $46.8
million contract by the Army Research Laboratory to adapt
telecommunications and information technologies for the
battlefield. The consortium, led by Lockheed Sanders Inc., also
includes Motorola, Bell Labs, GTE, MIT, the University of
Maryland, Morgan State University, Howard University and the City
College of New York. The researchers are trying to figure out how
to use cell phone technology, with its extremely limited
bandwidth, to transmit, receive and mix enormous amounts of
computer information.
     The UD Department of Computer and Information Sciences team,
headed by Paul D. Amer, will translate bandwidth priority systems
devised by the University's electrical engineering team into
computer software.
     Two other consortia are working on advanced sensoring
devices and interactive displays. The sensors will allow
information to be sent to command posts automatically, without
the soldier's intervention. One such sensor, for example, would
constantly read a soldier's vital signs and chart his or her
whereabouts so the command unit could monitor his or her medical
condition and location.
     "One thing we're working on is called 'fact exchange
protocols' for the battlefield," says Boncelet.  "Computers
communicate differently than people do. Computers send out
packets, or bursts, of information. In the competition for
bandwidth, these information bursts can be given a priority field
or label. The idea is that the most important data gets a
different field or label than the least. For example, in a
multimedia transmission, audio would be given a higher priority
than video.
     "All of this high technology comes with a price. The enemy
can try to eavesdrop or jam transmission," says Boncelet.
Jamming transmission is less likely because they would give
themselves away, he says. The real problem is eavesdropping. To
remedy that, Boncelet says the UD team is working on several
ideas, including using encryption codes that would change
meaningful data to gibberish and then back again; keeping
transmission power as low as possible; and changing channels in
rapid succession.
     The Army will determine what categories of information are
most to least important during battle. Then, UD's research team
must develop hardware and software that will allow for an
efficient flow of that information, a method of keeping it
secret, a way to compensate for soldiers who go out of range and
how to communicate with aircraft that are constantly moving.
     "Basically, our job is trying to figure out the best
communication system to take into battle," says Boncelet.
                                           -Barbara Garrison