Intelligent Agents for Mobile Network Coverage Analysis

Techniques and tools are needed that allow Commanders and Analysts to intelligently plan and re-assess mobile networks that are supporting missions and courses of action in the battlespace and emergency response settings. Many techniques, simulations, and tools are available to model, represent, and analyze the RF environment, however they are typically used for a priori planning or after action analysis. Unplanned changes to the RF environment such as environmental variations, position, jamming, and terrain effects may result in coverage shortfalls that hinder mission performance. As such, there exists a need to provide visual analysis of network coverage to Warfighters executing the mission in real-time. This paper details an ongoing research effort that seeks through provide real-time visualization of mobile network coverage through the orchestration of a variety of data sources, simulations, network analysis techniques and cognitive models. This variety of applications is assembled into a workflow through an intelligent agent framework and used to assess and display the expected coverage for the mission under way on a GoogleEarth map, resulting in mission participants being able to “see” where the coverage begins and ends for their device.