SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT
MOSA Standards Gain Momentum in the Market By John Reardon, Editor SOSA announces SOSA 1.0 If you are still trying to figure out what the 3rd “C” in C4ISR is, this is for you. Acronyms should not slow you down as they are prevalent and many still in use have lost their original meaning. An example that comes to mind is the VME International Trade Association that we now refer to as VITA. The ideas are to introduce you to some new standards, why they came about, and their importance to the segments of the market they address. The idea of an open standard is nothing new and has throughout history been driven by the idea of inoperability, lowering costs, and broadening the availability to multiple sources. History is littered with Open Standards that never reached critical mass or found themselves not advancing with the times. It is tempting to go through the history of architectures such as Multibus, Versabus, VME, G64, Futurebus, Compact PCI along with the many others to review what
precipitated their rise and fall, but we should probably look to the future. The move today to an open standard is very similar to the needs of history, but with one important distinction. In the past, the vendor community would join ranks and create an open standard that they felt might best advance their companies profit motives. This created debates about connectors, CPU choices, and other features that were at times politically charged to advance a companies IP expertise. Today users within the Department of Defense and to a lesser degree the vendors are driven by the application to employ advanced architectures that are SWAP-C optimized. This inverted style has challenged the norms and has created a whole new library of open standards described within MOSA or Modular Open Systems Approach. The idea is to address the applicational needs of the modern, joint
Figure 1: Annapolis Microsystems announces The WILD100 7-Slot 3U OpenVPX SOSA-Aligned Chassis (WC3170) is a COTS benchtop 3U VPX Chassis and Backplane that was specifically designed to economically speed the development of SOSA-aligned 100Gb Ethernet boards and systems. 20
COTS Journal | November 2021
domain battlefield with advanced open architectures that are defined and proven. To cherry-pick those that are optimized to the applicational needs of the market. But before we get ahead of ourselves let’s look at the MOSA. MOSA is not by itself a technical standard. It should be thought of as a technical and acquisition strategy for the future warfighter. A few years ago, the DoD issued a memorandum entitled “Modular Open Systems Approaches for our Weapon Systems is a Warfighting Imperative.” Within the memo, it described how vital to our success the use of open standards would be. It went on to mandate that MOSA supporting standards be included in all future requirements for weapon systems. Now by itself, this is not too earth-shaking as it was vague on details and seemingly stated the obvious advantages of adopting an open architecture for defense compute platforms. But things accelerated quickly as several supporting standards began to address the specific applicational needs. These are: SOSA – The Open Group Sensor Open System Architecture FACE – Future Airborne Capability Environment VICTORY – Vehicular Integration for C4ISR/ EW Interoperability CMOSS – C5ISR/EW Modular Open Suite of Standards GVA – Generic Vehicle Architecture HOST – Hardware Open Systems Technologies MORA – Modular Open Radio Frequency Architecture OMS/UCI – Open Mission Systems/Universal Command and Control Interface In developing MOSA and the underlying standards, starting from a white sheet of paper to re-create the wheel was not seen as a winning strategy. What was decided is that they would draw upon industry standards already in existence to rally the best possible. This strategy seemed sound enough when determining an in-
