Supporting the U.S. Army’s C5ISR/EW Modular Open Suite of Standards (CMOSS)
The U.S. Army has defined a suite of open architecture industry and US Army standards to enable the reduction of C5ISR (formerly C4ISR) system size, weight and power (SWaP) and ensure commonality across multiple platforms by enabling the sharing of hardware and software components. The C5ISR/EW Modular Open Suite of Standards (CMOSS), led by the U.S. Army CCDC (Combat Capabilities Development Command) C5ISR Center will help drive momentum in the embedded industry away from costly, complex proprietary solutions and towards COTS-based open architectures.
The Benefits of CMOSS
The widespread adoption of CMOSS by system integrators in the US, as well as “Five Eyes” and other NATO nations, will help move the implementation of C5ISR/C4ISR capabilities away from the use of costly and complex “stovepiped” separate “boxes” on individual platforms. The use of true open standards will make it easier and more cost-effective to upgrade capabilities or keep pace with commercial technology by eliminating complex integration challenges, lack of competition, and proprietary interfaces. In many cases stove-piped systems consume more SWaP than is currently available, thus necessitating expensive and time-consuming vehicle modifications.
Curtiss-Wright and CMOSS
We have a long history of industry collaboration and open standards development. In fact, Curtiss-Wright was a significant contributor to development of the VITA VPX and OpenVPX™ standards, which are the baseline technology in the CMOSS, Hardware Open Systems Technology (HOST), and Sensor Open Systems Architecture, also known as SOSA™, technical standards. Curtiss-Wright is committed to staying in lock step with these innovative standards as they continue to develop, ensuring our products continue bringing the benefits of open standards to today’s defense applications.
Further Reading
David Jedynak, Chief Technical Officer, COTS Solutions wrote about Making CMOSS deployable: The rubber hits the road in Military Embedded Systems Magazine.
CMOSS Standards:
The open standards currently included in CMOSS include:
- Vehicular Integration for C4ISR/EW Interoperability (VICTORY): provides network based interoperability using to share services such as Time and Position.
- OpenVPX: a hardware form factor for fielding capabilities as cards in a common chassis
- Modular Open RF Architecture (MORA): drives functional decomposition to share resources such as antennas and amplifiers
- Software frameworks: includes REDHAWK, Software Communications Architecture (SCA), and Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) to enable software portability