In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the US Department of Defense to build an on-demand airborne network for communications relay utilizing high-capacity, long-range military radio systems. While these systems operate well in a network of homogeneous systems, platforms generally employ multiple heterogeneous radio systems making internetworking difficult due to varying radio characteristics and lack of interoperability. Although simulations and emulation tests can provide a baseline for how systems will perform in a controlled environment, field tests are crucial to demonstrate capabilities in real-world operating environments. In this paper, we present measurement results from a field test involving two airborne platforms forming a dynamically routed aerial IP backbone over 200 nautical miles with various radio systems as part of the C4ISR on-the-move 2010 exercise. We present measurement results on per link performance, radio-to-router interface performance, and multihop network performance results with prototype software on open source platforms. Additionally, key lessons learned and recommendations are given.

There is very limited research published in the literature that applies content-based image retrieval (CBIR) techniques to retrieval of digitized spine X-ray images using a combination of inter-vertebral disc space and shape profiles. We present a novel technique to retrieve vertebra pairs that exhibit a specified disc space narrowing (DSN) and inter-vertebral disc shape profile. DSN is characterized using spatial and geometrical features between two adjacent vertebrae. Initial retrieval results are clustered and used to construct a voting committee to retrieve vertebra pairs with the highest DSN similarity. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is a promising approach for disc space-based spine X-ray image retrieval. The overall retrieval accuracy validated by a radiologist is 82.25%.