Effective and efficient communication of information

Research fields such as Network Enabled Capabilities, ubiquitous computing and distributed sensor networks, etc. deal with a lot of information and a lot of different processes to fuse data to a desired level of situation awareness. Already quite some research is done in applying information theoretic concepts to sensor management. Effective communication between functional components in the fusion hierarchy can be achieved by combining these approaches. We propose a method that makes the interaction between different fusion processes more efficient and effective. This is particularly useful in situations with costly or overused communication facilities.

I. Introduction

At the moment a great amount of research is done in the fields of Network Enabled Capabilities, ubiquitous computing and distributed sensor networks. A common theme is that a lot of information is available or is extracted from the environment and that there are processes that fuse this information to reach a desired level of situation awareness. There are at least two distinct approaches to these kind of problems. One is data fusion, that develops information fusing architectures and design principles for such systems. The other is sensor management, focusing on information quality and intelligent choices on when to use which sensor. Our work tries to bridge the gap between these two approaches, as they are related and strongly interdependent.