Terry D. Norbraten-Lieutenant, United States Navy

December 2004

Advisor: Donald P. Brutzman

Co-Advisor: Donald R. McGregor

Second Reader: Duane T. Davis

In order to plug-in current open sourced, open standard Java programming technology into the building blocks of the US Navy’s ForceNet, first, stove-piped systems need to be made extensible to other pertinent applications and then a new paradigm of adopting extensible and cross-platform open technologies will begin to bridge gaps with old and new weapons systems.  The battle-space picture in real time and with as much detail, or as little detail needed is now a current vital requirement.  Access to this information via wireless laptop technology is here now.  Transmission of data to increase the resolution of that battle-space snapshot will invariably be through noisy links.  Noisy links such as found in the shallow water littoral regions of interest will be where Autonomous Underwater and Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (AUVs/UUVs) are gathering intelligence for the sea warrior in need of that intelligence. 

The battle-space picture built from data transmitted within these noisy and unpredictable acoustic regions demands efficiency and reliability features abstract to the user.  To realize this efficiency Extensible Markup Language (XML) Schema-based Binary Compression (XSBC), in combination with Vandermode-based Forward Error Correction (FEC) erasure codes, offer the qualities of efficient streaming of plain text XML documents in a highly compressed form, and a data self-healing capability should there be loss of data during transmission in unpredictable transmission mediums.

Both the XSBC and FEC libraries detailed in this thesis are open sourced Java Application Program Interfaces (APIs) that can be readily adapted for extensible, cross-platform applications that will be enhanced by these desired features to add functional capability to ForceNet for the sea warrior to access on demand, at sea and in real-time.  These features will be presented in the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Workbench (AUVW) Java-based application that will become a valuable tool for warriors involved with Undersea Warfare (UW). 

http://theses.nps.navy.mil/04Dec_Norbraten.pdf 

A permanent copy of this thesis will be placed in the Dudley Knox Library’s digital archives at http://library.nps.navy.mil/uhtbin/hyperion/THESES.