By Ann Roosevelt
Boeing [BA]’s successful demonstration of its Tactical Communications Network for the Australian Defence Force (ADF) leads to the next step–flight tests, a company official said.
“These net-ready technologies are ready,” Tom DuBois, Boeing Rotorcraft Systems architect and Technical Fellow for Avionics and Software, told Defense Daily in a recent interview. “They may not address 100 percent of the U.S. government Global Information Grid requirements, but they’re in a form where they can be used in the near term for tactical advantage on the battlefield.”
Boeing demonstrated the ability to deliver streaming video over a mobile, ad hoc tactical communication network from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to a helicopter and ground troops.
“Our basic philosophy is we’re agnostic on radio systems, middleware, network processor and we want to be able to include as much COTS networking apps as possible and we’ll build our own if we have to, if it’s that important for the customer to have that new warfighting capability,” Dubois said.
Boeing demonstrated the network for Australian operational users March 16-18 after several ADF members saw its capabilities in the lab and at the command, control, communications, computer, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) On-The-Move event at Ft. Dix, N.J., last summer.
The ADF personnel asked Boeing to show operational users that the network is “real and ready to take the next step, which is in flight test,” he said.
Flight production hardware was brought to Boeing’s Systems Analysis Laboratory in Brisbane.
“What they brought down showed it was a true network, not a data link that’s point to point,” he said. “When you get information it’s posted to the network. Anyone else on the network can pick it up.”
The demonstration used Harris [HRS] SeaLancet radios, linked together in the back of a CH-47 Chinook helicopter, produced by Boeing, and the joint Boeing-Insitu Inc. ScanEagle unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).
The SeaLancet system provided the 10-megabit-per-second backbone, and has demonstrated the ability to have up to four simultaneous video streams going across the network, DuBois said.
ScanEagle video collected earlier at China Lake, Calif., was streamed from a laptop to a SeaLancet radio and posted to the network.
BuBois said, “if you’re on the network you can get anything anyone else sees.”
The team tried to make the user interface as close as possible to what people are already familiar with, such as instant messaging, he said.
Another facet of the network is the ability to have the UAV provide four or five snapshots instead of video of what it’s looking at when it reaches a particular point.
“The applications we ran on the network is really where the warfighters see the value,” DuBois said.
One application is called tactical white boarding. For example, troops on the ground can take a picture of what they see, mark it up and post it on the network. It is seen in real time by anybody who wants to see what that person is sending.
Chat is another available application.
An application still to come is language translation, an easy commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) addition, DuBois said.The next application the team is working on is real time weather.
“We found out from the Safety Center that a lot of the accidents that are attributed to pilot error have a contributing factor of un-forcasted weather. If you can’t afford to add a weather radar to the aircraft, we can grab it from the network…The look and feel of this thing is very much like when you have an instant messaging program and you see your friends pop in and pop out.”
Next, the team will work on middleware, so no matter if it’s the Future Combat System’s System of Systems Common Operating Environment (SOSCOE) middleware or middleware from a COTS center, the middleware can be swapped.
“We want to make it so the applications, even the middleware itself doesn’t know if it’s talking to another SOSCOE or another COTS product,” he said.
“We used the FCS SOSCOE middleware, the [U.S. and Australian] governments signed off on it, we exported it to Australia and we used in our demonstrations and it worked great,” he said. “This is the first international spinout of SOSCOE.”
The team also was able to add in legacy systems. Blue Force Tracker information comes on the network display and there are message translators so the network can link onto such messaging standards as Link 16, he said.
“Our approach is to get in there as soon as that data is collected, push it on to the network, and have the network take care of posting it,” Dubois said. “Every node is a router…it all happens behind the scene the way the Internet works.”
Technically, there is a three-pound payload for a UAV, a manpack system a communications specialist typically would have, and handheld radios for troops.
The network is secure, but doesn’t have multiple levels of security. This not only allows the radios to be exported, but allows individual nations to use their own encryption devices.
For Chinook, there are three basic ways of integrating the network. One is a flight-worthy pallet that matches the tie down on Chinook, Black Hawk and even C-130 aircraft. The pallet has one crashworthy seat, a 17-inch BARCO display, rugged keyboard, network processor and SeaLancet radio electronics.
A second way to integrate the system on a Chinook is to replace certain existing radios.
The third way is to make it part of the basic system. On the new generation F-Model Chinook, the team has shown the ability in the lab to push its network situational awareness display into the Common Avionics Architecture System (CAAS), produced by Rockwell Collins [COL]. This way, network information would appear as a page on the CAAS system. To integrate the network with the CAAS cockpit would take a little time due to the requirements of flight certification and airworthiness. To have the network available more quickly, it would be possible to do something on a kneeboard, without going through the and off the CAAS cockpit.
For UAVs, Boeing has developed a three-pound payload for the network that would be carried in addition to the existing sensor payload..
Aside from Australia, there is U.S. interest in the tactical communications system, DuBois said. For example, meetings are scheduled in May with special forces.