Army seeking white papers for Assured PNT CMOSS effort

The Army is seeking white papers for a C4ISR/EW Modular Open Suite of Standards, or CMOSS, "card" with assured positioning, navigation and timing functionality, according to a General Services Administration notice.

The service is developing CMOSS, a common platform that will converge mission command, fires capabilities and movement and maneuver, with the help of the Assured PNT cross-functional team’s new Open Innovation Lab.

The Dec. 15 GSA notice states the Open Innovation Lab "will ideally verify compliance to modular open systems architectures (i.e. CMOSS), the PNT reference architecture and other open standards."

The service in September prototyped a CMOSS chassis that acted like a receptacle that would swap relevant cards in and out of a system, instead of the entire system itself. During a different demonstration this year, the service was able to integrate a CMOSS chassis onto a Stryker platform with a PNT card during a test at White Sands Missile Range, NM.

"This standard will be very modular and allow us to replace at the card level rather than at the box level capabilities," Col. Nickolas Kioutas, project manager for PNT, told reporters in September. "And that's very important to us because one of the cruxes we have . . . in getting capability into the force is integrating into the platform."

The notice states the CMOSS card must utilize military code, have assured PNT functionality, including GPS capabilities, and "all systems and components shall implement services to receive/consume external PNT data from authorized source such as PNT Mounted system."

They should also comply with the following Vehicular Integration for C4ISR/EW Interoperability (VICTORY) standards: position service whenever position data is required; time synchronization service with precision time protocol or network time protocol; orientation service; and director of travel service.

Industry is asked to respond by Jan. 7, 2021.