The SOSA™ (Sensor Open Systems Architecture) Consortium is developing common open standards for designing, building, and deploying hardware, software, and firmware components of new military electronic systems. SOSA contributing members are U.S. government organizations including the U.S. DoD, Army, Navy, and Air Force, as well as key representatives from industry and universities.
SOSA adopts the most appropriate subsets of existing open standards to form a multi-purpose backbone of building blocks for current and future embedded systems for Radar, EO/IR, SIGINT, EW, and communications. Objectives include vendor interoperability, lower procurement costs, easier new technology upgrades, quicker reaction to new requirements, and longer life cycles. Because the emerging SOSA hardware standard draws primarily from OpenVPX and other related VITA standards, the new technologies, topologies, and environmental requirements critical to meeting SOSA objectives must be supported by extensions to these VITA standards.
This article is an overview of the SOSA and VITA organizations and how they interact, along with the challenges, successful strategies, and illustrative examples.
