An Adaptive, Distributed Airborne Tracking System

This paper describes a United States Air Force Advanced Technology Demonstration (ATD) that applied value-based scheduling to produce an adaptive, distributed tracking component appropriate for consideration by the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) program. This tracker was designed to evaluate application-specific Quality of Service (QoS) metrics to quantify its ability to provide tracking services in a dynamic environment and to derive scheduling parameters directly from these QoS metrics to control short-term tracker behavior. The prototype tracker was implemented on the MK7.3 operating system, which provided value-based processor scheduling and a distributed thread programming abstraction. The resulting tracker “processes the right tracks at the right time” by appropriately managing those resources needed for track processing. The prototype automatically updates all of the tracked objects when system is not overloaded, and gracefully degrades when there are insufficient resources. The prototype has performed extremely well during demonstrations to AWACS operators and tracking system designers.