A Distributed Realtime Embedded Application for Surveillance, Detection, and Tracking of Time

As computer systems become increasingly inter-networked, there is a growing class of distributed real-time embedded (DRE) applications that have charac-teristics and present challenges beyond those of tradi-tional embedded systems. They involve many hetero-geneous nodes and links, shared and constrained re-sources, and are deployed in dynamic environments with changing participants. In this paper, we present a representative DRE application of medium scale that we are developing for the DARPA PCES program. This application consists of several unmanned aerial vehicles, command and control centers, and ground based combat vehicles to perform surveillance, detec-tion, and tracking of time critical targets, an ever in-creasing threat in today’s world. We describe the ap-plication, the scenario in which the application is be-ing demonstrated, and issues and challenges associ-ated with developing a DRE application of this complexity