By Geoff Fein
As personnel at Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) are finding that even in the early introduction of Open Architecture (OA) into the Unmanned Combat Air Systems (UCAS) program, they are realizing cost savings, a program official said.
“What happened was we originally had our architecture being developed over a legacy system that somewhat emulated what you see in…today’s Link 16, where everything is sort of time division, everything is scheduled and everything has to be preplanned,” Glenn Colby, aviation ship integration integrated product team lead, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
In that regimented approach to communications, every time a change is made, the entire system has to be redesigned, he added.
“We came across a technology from DARPA in 2005 that gave us even better performance than what we had with our legacy systems, with all the network benefits as well,” Colby said. “That was the Tactical Targeting Network Technology. We started doing experiments with that in 2005.”
Personnel were not really expecting to see the cost benefits, he added.
“Frankly, it was just one of these things where we started playing with interfacing to the network system and one day the software guys looked at one another and said ‘all this code we have been writing for the legacy systems…we don’t need this anymore.’ They started throwing code away,” Colby said.
The Navy had literally thousands and thousands of line of code across many different systems and boiled it down to a few software sockets that were really no more complex than software sockets that would be in a personal computer talking to the Internet, Colby said. “And the whole system worked, in fact it worked much better than anything.”
“We had certain design problems with the old system that we couldn’t figure out how to fix, where you’d have multiple aircraft and multiple networks and how they would interface with each other and how would you get information from one aircraft to another, or one ship to another,” he said. “We couldn’t come up with an engineering solution.
“Then we went to the networking systems and the engineering solution was there…it came with the system … it was pretty amazing,” Colby added.
UCAS is still in development and demonstration, and Colby acknowledges he doesn’t have anything he would call validated results from a production program. “But when we’ve started to estimate what it takes to add more capability to the system, we estimate that every time we have to interface with one of these monolithic legacy systems, it costs about 10 times as much as adding a network interface.”
By network interface, he means things like an IP-type interface that a computer might have for a standard network.
“It really is powerful. So when you say ‘hey I want X amount of capability in your platform,’ you can either get it at much less the cost or you can get much more capability for the same amount of effort,” Colby said. “That’s why we say we are really trying to deign the system around just purely network interfaces and trying to get rid of as many legacy non-network systems as possible. We may not be able to get there, but certainly we can see the cost differential.”