Subject: [NEXTEL-1] MILITARY: Satellites Key To $17 Billion

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2003 01:20:01 -0500

MILITARY: Satellites Key To $17 Billion
Network Of The Future

Nov 01, 2003

BOSTON - The Department of Defense (DoD) has earmarked $17 billion to
overhaul how the U.S. military communicates, with satellites being an
integral part of that effort.

Michael Frankel, deputy assistant secretary of defense for the C3,
space, and information technology program, laid out a vision of the
networked military of the future called the Global Information Grid
(GIG) at the Milcom 2003 conference held here Oct. 13-16.

As part of the GIG, a new generation of communications satellites, using
optical technology and data processing, is under development. The
project, called the Transformational Satellite Program, is estimated by
Frankel to cost $8.7 billion to implement over the next 10 to 15 years.

Dr. Scott Stadler, chief technologist at DoD's MILSATCOM Innovation
Center, said that the next generation satellites would have networking
capabilities and serve as the backbone for the entire communications
network connecting deployed "users and enclaves to the wired GIG." The
next generation systems will use a layered network architecture,
providing services at both circuit and network layers. Circuit
connections will be used to serve legacy users as well as to accommodate
high-rate data streams, he said. The network service will provide the IP
capability that will bring the power of the Internet to the warfighter,
enabling network centric operations. The network service will support
different routing models appropriate for connecting isolated users,
small networks, and large autonomous systems.

Stadler said the new satellite system will include "policy-based network
management," which means that resources will be dynamically allocated in
accordance with the importance of a given mission, for example the
soldier on the ground in combat, could have priority in accessing and
using the system.

Key characteristics of the transformational satellites will be large
multi-beam antennas, on-board IP routing of traffic, and laser
cross-links between satellites.  The multi- beam antennas will allow the
military to deliver high-data rates to very small terminals. The
terminals used for the system will be much smaller, and will be much
more numerous. "The bottom line is we will see a whole lot of very small
terminals," he said. The goal is to get T-1 rates using terminals with a
one-foot aperture. Lasercom aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
terminals will be also be a key part of the transformational
communication system, he said.

The system will also employ dynamic bandwidth resource allocation. "We
typically design our systems to handle worst-case scenarios," Stadler
said. "This includes worst case weather, worst case jamming, and
satellite end of life. The bottom line is that the average user will
have a substantial amount of margin to get data through the system.
Dynamic bandwidth resource allocation allows us to adapt to the
prevalent environmental conditions and use that margin to provide more
capacity to a given user or to free up resources for other users," he
said.

Terrestrial Components

David Mihelcic, chief executive engineer for GIG-BE [Bandwidth
Expansion] at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), said that
there has been phenomenal growth of the DoD's classified Internet called
SIPRNET (Secret Internet Protocol Network), which has pushed the system
to its limits. The GIB-BE is a program designed to solve this problem
and move the military communications system into the 21st century. DoD
wants to have enough capacity in 2009 to transmit 100,000 Mbps
simultaneously. "We can't get enough bandwidth," Mihelcic said.

The BE portion of the GIG is the terrestrial component - building out a
fiber-optic based IP network. There are two components to this effort -
rapid expansion of bandwidth and diversity of physical access to the
wide area network.
Mihelcic said that there are two layers to the architecture for the BE -
the optical transport layer and the network layer. The network layer
takes a telecom infrastructure and "turns it into something that can
provide interoperability communications that are essential to
implementing the GIG."

He said that the current system is a "traditional legacy stove-pipe
environment where we have lots of point-to-point circuits running over
an ATM network. We want to move to a world where everything is converged
over a single IP backbone."
Kenneth Schmidt, technical director for DoD communications systems at
Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, explained how the
terrestrial wireless communication system on the battlefield, known as
the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS), fits in with the larger GIG
system. He stressed that the JTRS will need to be interoperable with
legacy systems as well as the next-generation satellite system. "Network
management will be a vexing issue in the future and it will drive
applications of the GIG."

Schmidt said that the goal of JTRS will be to provide access to a
"global set of users" while maintaining security of the communications.
"We want to have dynamic, secure networks," he said. The JTRS will
provide a unified interface with the other network components, including
satcom. "We want to have mobile ad-hoc networks that can exchange
information and provide seamless connectivity," he explained.

"In the future, what we would like to see is some of these wireless
technologies migrate toward a heterogeneous network ... so if you have a
satcom or airborne network data link that can provide communications in
a more efficient manner, we would like the network to explore that,
optimize the routing and relieve some of the traffic," he said.

Plug and Play Networks

Dawn Meyerriecks, chief technology officer with DISA, talked about her
agency's role in providing network-centric enterprise services. "What we
are asking vendors to do is to allow us to 'plug and play' capacity
seamlessly," she said. "We are not going to tell you what platforms to
buy, we are simply going to say this is what they need to look like -
these are the sorts of things you need to look for in terms of
reliability, availability, computing power, etc. Then we are going to
plug and play the services on top of that."

Meyerriecks said that DISA would like to "work with industry to figure
out how we go after this" integrated communications network of the
future. She explained that to get a plug and play integrated network,
DISA plans to "put everything out on the Internet, all our intellectual
property. This is causing consternation with our vendor partners.
Basically, infrastructure services are not something that will be
proprietary. It is not about making money."

She added, "We are going to try and change the economic environment in
such a way that vendors will supply things of value to end-users and
agree to use common architecture." Christopher Kubic, technical director
for network and space information assurance at the National Security
Agency, told the panel that NSA would provide end-to-end information
assurance for the GIG. The challenge is to support high availability of
access for users, while maintaining security of the network. "We need to
limit access depending on who you are and where you are." Kubic said,
"We need to define an integrated IA architecture for the GIG, something
we haven't done before." The GIG is going to be a "mixture of commercial
and governments," which will present challenges from an information
security perspective, he said.  Network management and security
management need to go hand-in-hand, he stressed.

$1.5B For Commercial Operators

Stadler said that commercial satellite operators will have a role in the
future military communications system, but they will have to adapt their
systems to plug into the integrated GIG. Stadler acknowledged that the
significant expansion in capacity that would result from the next
generation of military satellites could mean that less commercial
capacity would be needed. But, he added, "warfighters have an insatiable
desire for bandwidth."

In addition to the GIG program, the DoD expects to order $200 million to
$300 million per year worth of commercial satellite services, or a total
of close to $1.5 billion over the next five years, said John P. Stenbit,
assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration.
He shared his views in an exclusive interview with SN's Government
Procurement Report after an Oct. 14 luncheon speech at the MilCom 2003
conference.

For the military deployment in Iraq, the DoD's use of commercial
satellite communications reached 75 percent of the total communications
budget - the highest percentage ever, Stenbit said. "So it's always our
intention to have a mix of internal DoD and commercial satellite
services and then use commercial to handle surges in demand," he
explained.

Satellite communications will play a key role in the U.S. Army's Future
Combat System (FCS), according to Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes. Byrnes,
commanding general of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC),
spoke with GPR after his presentation on the networked battlefield of
the future at MilCom 2003.

"We are going to operate over extended distances," Byrnes explained. "We
have got to break free from terrestrial communications systems. If you
look at complex terrain such as mountains and urban areas, we have got
to rely on overhead platforms, whether satellite or long-dwelling
UAV-mounted communication systems. That is the wave of the future," he
said.
--Fred Donovan

www.telecomweb.com

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