White Paper

WHITE PAPER SOSA and VITA Working Together for Next-Gen Defense Systems mrcy.com 3 VITA continues its strong role in promoting and developing open architecture embedded system standards, actively supporting numerous working groups in the VSO, and working with vendors and other organizations to embrace new technology and meet new market requirements. OPEN SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURE DIRECTIVE AND INITIATIVES In May 2013, the U.S. Under Secretary of Defense issued a milestone memo mandating that all acquisition activity must incorporate DoD Open Systems Architecture (OSA) principles and practices. These include using existing or evolving open standards for well-defined modular hardware and software components that can be sourced from multiple vendors. Once proven, hardware platforms should be reusable for quick-reaction mission needs, feature upgrades, and new technology insertion. Software architectures must be layered and extensible to permit operating system and security upgrades, and to accommodate new applications and user interfaces. These advantages reduce development risks and help ensure significantly longer operational life cycles. In response, each of the three primary U.S. service branches (Army, Navy, and Air Force), began developing standards that embraced OSA principles to meet future procurement needs of deployed systems for their respective services. The Army 's CCDC (Combat Capabilities Development Command) in Aberdeen, MD developed CMOSS (C4ISR/EW Modular Open Suite of Standards). These standards include OpenVPX for hardware, VICTORY to share vehicle services (like time and position) for C4ISR/EW interoperability, and MORA (Modular Open RF Architecture) to share antennas and amplifiers. It also uses REDHAWK and SCA software frameworks. The Navy 's NAVAIR (Naval Air Systems Command) in Patuxent River, MD created HOST (Hardware Open Systems Technology), which initially focused on embedded processing for airborne and ground vehicle missions. Its major goal of abstracting hardware and software components aligned well with OSA concepts. HOST hardware definitions include three tiers: Tier 1 defines the deployed platform (airframe, vehicle, UAV, etc.), Tier 2 defines the embedded system enclosure, and Tier 3 the boards, backplanes, modules, and faceplates. Tiers 2 and 3 are subsets of OpenVPX modules and profiles. A registry of Tier 3 products offers an approved catalog of components for sharing across programs. The Air Force's OMS (Open Mission Systems) initiative incorporates SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) for commercially developed concepts and middleware, and UCI (Universal Command and Control Interface), which standardizes massages and middleware for sharing command and control mission information between airborne system elements. OMS strongly embraces FACE (Future Airborne Capability Environment), a consortium of The Open Group that adopts open software standards for avionics systems, which gained full support of all three-armed services.

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