A US government initiative called the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS)
is currently causing a major paradigm change in how government radio
systems are being designed. Although such radios have extensively
employed software in the past, JTRS moves these platforms to the concept
of a "Software Defined radio", where communications capabilities are
installed on a standard platform much like applications are installed on
a PC. The applications themselves consist of a collection of CORBA
components and other libraries, and are launched by a generic
application manager. The application manager's "scripts", which
describe which components to launch, what hardware and processing
facilities they require, and how to establish interconnections between
them are specified in eXtensible Markup Language (XML).
The structure of the XML files themselves is loosely based on the Object
Management Group's CORBA Component Model, and specified by the JTRS
Software Communications Architecture (SCA). These configurations
consist of a number of inter-related files. For example, several files
may describe the characteristics of an individual component and its
interfaces; whereas another file describes which components make up a
superceding application, and how to configure and interconnect these
components.
Manually creating, reviewing and maintaining these configuration files
by hand is very costly and error prone, with a typical radio waveform
being described using over 1000 - 3000 lines of XML. JVMS attempts to
create a system that allows for conceptual modeling of a JTRS
configuration, and provides the ability to generate the corresponding
set of XML files.
The goal of JVMS is to provide a visual "CAD-like" means of creating and
visualizing JTRS configurations. The integrity of the resulting model
is then checked for validity against certain constraints, and the
corresponding JTRS configuration files can be produced.
For more information about JTRS and the SCA, see
http://jtrs.army.mil/.