Send Measurements, Not Coordinates

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Abstract
In a large and growing number of systems, both military and commercial, position reporting plays a central role. The widespread practice of transmitting coordinates offers ease of understanding, and is appropriate for some surveillance and fleet monitoring operations. In many emerging applications, however, that practice is in fact a major impediment to performance. A long list of limitations would be largely (in some instances, completely) eliminated by adopting one fundamental design change. The seemingly unspectacular step of transmitting only measurements—independent of any reference frame—instead of coordinates (or even coordinates-plus-velocity) is a key to startling improvements in capability. The cumulative weight of the benefits, all of which are absent when preprocessing measurements into coordinates, merits serious consideration, especially for safety-critical applications.

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