The Navy should continue the approach without locking itself into the protocols and standards imposed.
C.1.7 Maintain Parallel Paths Until the Transition Is Complete This approach means pursuing a dual path for some time. By requiring that all new system capabilities interface to the prototype, the Navy will ensure its ability to transition gracefully to the Internet technology at the earliest possible point and avoid long-term legacy costs.
APPENDIX C 165 ates forecast a 71 percent compound annual growth rate for this market, from
$1.3 billion in 1998 to $19.2 billion in 2002.
To put a less-speculative dollar figure on the commercial interest in wireless Internet communications, the most recent auction of radio-frequency (RF) spec- trum rights in the United Kingdom brought in more than $30 billion and one in Germany brought in $45 billion.2 That is, telecommunications service providers have recently spent a total of $75 billion to acquire rights to use certain regions of the RF spectrum within the United Kingdom and Germany. They will, of course, spend large additional sums on equipment and real-estate leases to build the infrastructure they need to provide wireless Internet connectivity. Bidding for spectrum rights in other countries is expected to be just as expensive.3
It is safe to say that there is enormous commercial interest in wireless Inter- net services and that it will be difficult for the Navy to match the investments that are currently being made in the commercial arena. Fortunately it does not have to; on the contrary, it can leverage them for its own uses.
Whether these commercial advances in wireless Internet technology have any relevance for the Navy and its tactical systems is considered next. As will be seen, they certainly are highly relevant and promise great utility for the Na- vy’s tactical information systems. Perhaps the best way to approach the Navy’s specific needs for wireless communications is to give a brief recap of its techni- cal requirements, mapping each of the requirements onto the current commercial technology. When the wireless medium is thought of as a communications service that allows tactical platforms to communicate with one another, it is clear that four key technical issues must be addressed:
• Quality of service (QOS),
• Bandwidth,
• Flexibility, and
• Military-specific characteristics.
The remainder of this section describes each of these issues briefly and shows that the first two are extremely important in the commercial telecommuni- cations industry: they are currently receiving very substantial investments and
2For auction information, see Broadband Fixed Wireless Access Spectrum Auction Site of the Radiocommunications Agency, United Kingdom, at <www.spectrumauctions.gov.uk/>, and (2) Xin- hua News Agency, 2000, “Roundup: Mobile Commerce Emerging as New Business Trend,” Special Editions, Northern Light Technology, Inc., Cambridge, Mass., September 9, available online at
<http://special.northernlight.com/wireless/roundup.htm>.
3Indeed, these auctions raise issues in their own right for the Navy. As it happens, JTIDS radios currently occupy a highly desirable swath of RF spectrum. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the DOD would lose access to this spectrum if it were auctioned off to the highest commercial bidders.
indeed are already being deployed in a major way. The third issue, flexibility, is receiving attention in the commercial world but is by no means perfect. The fourth issue includes all the military-specific problems in wireless communica- tions (antijam is an example) and so will require military investment, as has historically been the case. The really good news, however, is that the two most difficult problems—QOS and bandwidth—have been tackled with great vigor in the commercial world, and the Navy’s tactical communications can be the bene- ficiary.
C.2.2 Quality of Service
QOS is most readily understood in terms of specific services that must be provided with high degrees of reliability. In general, tactical uses for QOS demand high availability, low-loss and low-delay bounds, and often have mili- tary precedence or priority.
It is interesting to note that commercial demand for voice over Internet Protocol (IP) led in the past year to readily available technology for this capability.
The extent of this revolution is perhaps not yet apparent outside the telecommu- nications industry, but it is indeed remarkable. Every major telecommunications company is deploying a voice over IP infrastructure as its next-generation tele- phony system. As has been widely reported in the press, AT&T has ceased buying conventional circuit switches. AT&T’s chairman, Michael Armstrong, has expressed the company’s telephony plans very succinctly: “For AT&T, it’s IP.”4 Equipment vendors are similarly committed to voice over IP. The list of such vendors includes all major manufacturers of telephony equipment (Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Nortel, and so on), all major manufacturers of com- puter and data networking equipment (Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Compaq, Sun, 3Com, and so on), and all major component manufacturers (Intel, Texas Instru- ments, and so on). All these companies have QOS-enabled Internet products currently available for sale.
Frost & Sullivan’s estimates show voice over IP telephony services bringing in about $1 billion in 2000 and rising to more than $90 billion by 2006. Voice over IP equipment sales are expected to accelerate at a similar rate. Although it may not be immediately apparent to anyone outside the telecommunications industry, the near-term future of QOS networks is now perfectly clear. Current industry effort is tightly focused on building out all the standards-based Internet protocols that will be required for full voice over IP service and on creating both equipment and systems of “five 9’s” (0.99999 availability and capability) robust-
4Armstrong, C. Michael, Chairman and CEO, AT&T Corporation, “Plain Talk about the Future,”
remarks delivered to the meeting “Internet World” in New York, October 8, 1998. Available online at <http://www.att.com/speeches/98/981008.maa.html>.
APPENDIX C 167 ness so that they can be brought into full service as soon as possible. The next- generation, voice over IP-based global telephone system is now well into its deployment phase all over the world.5
The committee submits, therefore, that the Navy will have little or no trou- ble acquiring Internet-based communications equipment that provides QOS guar- antees sufficient for the tactical tasks at hand—namely, high availability, low loss, low delay, and prioritized traffic.
C.2.3 Wireless Bandwidth
Contemporary wireless technology can provide orders-of-magnitude im- provements in throughput over today’s tactical radio systems. But this is only half the story. More important is that wireless data communication is an ex- tremely “hot” area and that the technology is advancing by leaps and bounds, indeed, at Internet speeds. Just as is seen with fiber-optic transmission and switching technology, it is highly likely that data rates provided across wireless channels will grow geometrically over the near term in response to Internet demand. RF channels, of course, provide nothing like the potential bandwidth of fiber, and so wireless speeds will probably never come close to those available across fiber, but even the existing wireless technology can provide major advan- tages for the Navy.
The commercial wireless world is extremely fragmented, so it is impossible to provide a comprehensive overview of the field. Instead, three representative, wide-area systems are concentrated on here. Each occupies a very different point in the technology space and so the systems are quite different, with each being built by a major equipment vendor. The intent here is to show that the Navy already has a rather broad set of high-speed wireless technologies that it could choose from, if it so wished, and that each of these technologies is cur- rently backed by a large and reputable manufacturer.6
• Qualcomm high-data-rate technology. This evolutionary advance in code division multiple access cellular technology provides air link speeds of up to 2.4 Mbps in a 1.25-MHz channel. It is an Internet-based technology that can be
5As one concrete example, Genuity reports that it was delivering over 100 million minutes of use per month in August 2000 on a QOS-enabled VOIP network that could at that time handle 80,000 concurrent phone calls.
6Manufacturer-supplied details for these systems may be found at the following Web sites: QUAL- COMM Incorporated (San Diego, Calif.), High Data Rate System (HDR), <http://www.
qualcomm.com/hdr/>; Cisco Systems, Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), WT-2700 Broadband System, <http://
www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/witc/wt2700/>; and Terabeam (Seattle, Wash.), Fiberless Optical System, <http://www.terabeam.com>.
embedded in handsets, laptops, notebooks, and many other sorts of fixed or mobile devices.
• Cisco WT2700 Suite. This is a point-to-point, non-line-of-sight micro- wave radio system that provides speeds of up to 44 Mbps full duplex at ranges up to 30 miles within channel bandwidths of up to 12 MHz at about 2.5 GHz. It employs advanced modulation techniques such as vector orthogonal frequency division multiplexing and spatial and frequency diversity to take advantage of multipath signal reflections.
• Terabeam free-space optical technology. Terabeam is a Lucent-funded
$550 million venture that provides a high-speed (up to 1,000 Mbps) Internet service across 1,550-nanometer free-space optical links arranged into small hub- and-spoke cells. As is typical with optical solutions, the links can be very ad- versely affected by weather and indeed blocked altogether. However, field trials apparently indicate that reliable service may be possible at distances up to 1 km, even in cities such as Seattle.
Of course it could well be that none of the new technologies listed above turn out to be precisely suitable for the Navy’s BMC3 wireless connectivity.
However, they are all indicative of the technological revolution that is roiling the commercial wireless community. Going further, it seems highly likely to the committee that the Navy could benefit very significantly from applying some of this new technology to meet its wireless connectivity needs. In general, contem- porary wireless technology provides very high bandwidth in an open, readily adaptable, standards-based package.
C.2.4 Flexibility
With respect to flexibility, the commercial technology beats military systems hands down. Military radio systems, such as JTIDS (Link 16), are notorious for the extraordinarily detailed and voluminous planning that is required before they can be used. Entire staffs are devoted to planning tactical networks, and these plans often take months to prepare. This is a key weakness of such systems. It is so difficult to prepare radio plans that tactical operations may indeed suffer because the radio networks cannot be properly replanned fast enough to meet an evolving situation.
The situation is very different for commercial wireless technologies. Al- though certain types of wireless systems are indeed quite hard to plan—cellular base station planning comes to mind as an obvious example—most of the com- mercial technologies are designed so that they can be set up and brought into use almost immediately, by operators with relatively little specialized knowledge.
Cellular phones are one case in point; when a subscriber acquires a cell phone, it is mandatory that this new, uninitialized phone be brought into the cellular pro- vider’s network as quickly and easily as possible. Point-to-point radio links are
APPENDIX C 169 another case in point. Here the goal is to allow untrained purchasers to set up their own radio links within minutes after opening the packing cartons.
It is understood that the military operates under a number of restrictions on its use of RF spectrum and that these restrictions can complicate the planning and deployment of wireless networks. It is important to realize, though, that the commercial world operates under restrictions nearly as onerous. A great many of the Navy’s planning and configuration problems are simply self-imposed (e.g., time-slot planning for JTIDS networks), and one can reasonably expect that commercial technology would be far simpler and more flexible than that of existing tactical radio systems.
C.2.5 Military-specific Characteristics
Last but not least, a tactical communications system imposes certain re- quirements that are either unique to the military or far more stringent than their commercial analogs. Obvious examples include the ability to continue function- ing in the presence of jamming (antijam) and low probabilities of interception or detection.
In general, commercial equipment is engineered without significant effort in these areas and hence cannot be directly employed in adverse tactical environ- ments. On the other hand, some types of commercial wireless equipment inher- ently provide certain capabilities in this area, almost by accident as it were. For instance, point-to-point, free-air communications—and in particular optical links—are generally somewhat difficult to jam, unless by interposed obscurants, because they are highly directional. Similarly, commercial spread-spectrum sys- tems offer a modest degree of protection against jamming and indeed somewhat lower the probabilities of detection or interception. It is conceivable that these levels of protection may prove adequate in some tactical scenarios. By and large, though, unmodified commercial technology is not suitable for tactical uses.
Perhaps surprisingly, commercial equipment performs particularly well in encryption and information assurance. Many vendors can supply wireless equip- ment that supports both link encryption and end-to-end data encryption. The commercially supplied encryption mechanisms are in general reasonably good and can often be readily replaced or augmented with military-grade encryption mechanisms as needed.
On the whole, then, the Navy should expect to devote resources to satisfying the purely military needs in wireless communications. However, existing com- mercial equipment often provides an excellent starting point for these modifica- tions. In general, the Navy would be best served by adapting current state-of- the-art commercial wireless equipment to meet its tactical needs rather than engineering entirely new systems.
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