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