What is needed is an organization with acquisition authority that can step up to define the requirements, put them together and lay out a program. “I believe Congress would be very open to that,” he said, pointing to the National GeospatialIntelligence Agency’s commercial imagery programs as a successful example. “Industry is ready to do this, but there has to be leadership in the acquisition community,” he suggested. “They have to say, we’re going to do this, we’re going to drive down costs and create a global capability that is based on commercial EoIP. We’re going to minimize the legacy systems that we have.” It’s a different way of doing business, Boutelle observed. “Those who built the legacy systems will not be your best friends. They won’t be an advocate for that, because it changes their business model, which is very lucrative. It’s like what happened in the 1980s with the telephone system—you had one provider with one wired line to your house. After the phone systems were broken up and IP came alive, we moved to voice, data and video and the choices we have today. “The commercial satellite industry needs the same transformation that happened to the telephone industry. It has to be driven by senior leadership in DoD, and executed by the services and the Defense Information Systems Agency. If that isn’t there, it will be done eventually, but it will cost DoD more and take longer,” Boutelle warned. The end-to-end IP network has to extend to the ground as well, he said. “Looking at the global IP architecture for satellites, agencies need to look at where it comes down to earth, and to modify and converge DoD’s ground environment in the same way as an enterprise IP network, just as the commercial world is doing today. We need to emulate that and look not only at the satellites, but also at how it is brought to earth. The goal is to create a clean, efficient and more cost-effective enterprise IP network.”
Routing in Space Launched in 2009, the IRIS program comprises a router and modem installed on Intelsat’s IS-14 satellite. By routing IP traffic in space, it enables IP users to directly communicate over satellite without having to double-hop data to and from www.MIT-kmi.com
an intermediate earth station, thus saving time and money. Cisco last year turned over operation of IRIS service to TeleCommunication Systems (TCS), which is now offering the world’s first commercial service offering of a Cisco enabled IRIS managed network service. In the interview, Boutelle focused on the results of the IRIS Joint Capabilities Technology Demonstration (JCTD) managed by Cisco for the DoD. The tests were extremely successful, Boutelle reported. “What people found is that once you move to an all-IP network, you dramatically drive down costs of voice, video, data and other communications. You also increase the capability and user friendliness. The same devices that you can buy for your home can be used on IP on the ground or in space.” While the system performed well in the area selected by U.S. Strategic Command, covering much of the Americas, Africa, Western Europe and the Mediterranean, the tests also reflected some of the technical and other challenges involved in implementing this approach. “The downside is that anytime you build something for DoD, they look at a global footprint—something that can operate in the U.S., Asia and the Middle East,” Boutelle noted. “The footprint only covered a piece of that. So the users would say they liked it in Europe and the U.S., but they needed to train on what they were going to be using in Southwest Asia. So they would have to go back to their legacy systems, because that was what they were going to take into theater. So it was a great demonstration of IRIS, but the utility of it to military personnel who were transitioning back and forth to the Gulf was minimal. They have to have something that they can train on in the U.S. and then use in Afghanistan or wherever they are.” Now that TCS is operating IRIS, Cisco is working on the next generation system, which is envisioned as a router and modem combined with a channelizer. Currently being used in the military’s Wideband Global SATCOM program, channelizers enable the movement of bandwidth on demand between users and locations, thus achieving greater efficiencies. “We are seeing increased use of channelizers. We’re putting together systems that have a router behind a channelizer,
which appears to be the optimal solution in the commercial sector,” Boutelle said. “If you look at what you can do with a channelizer and router, there are some dramatic things that provide the same capabilities for a lot less cost than what DoD is spending today, or do a lot more for the same cost,” he continued. “As we start to see a draw down of the budget and forces, you have to look at how you can maintain what you have for less, or get more capability for the same cost. If we start to focus on Asia, for example, we can look at global constellations of capabilities.” “Why would routing and channelizing help you?” Boutelle asked. “First of all, we found that when you put a router on a satellite, many things happen that we at Cisco, which isn’t officially a satellite company, didn’t understand. Now that we’ve been in this for a couple of years, we’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned that you can have double the capacity on the same satellite dish when you move it to IP, and that when you put a router on a satellite, you can decrease the size of the power amplifiers by half, so you can build a smaller satellite or add more capability to the satellite.” “The fact that the system is software controlled from the ground offers tremendous versatility,” he added. “You can put multiple routers and modems on, and you can upload the entire router from the ground. Redundancy is provided by uploading multiple routers, and you can change or upgrade the software from the ground. Today, when you launch a satellite, what you have on it is what will be on it in 15 years. But on Intelsat 14, which IRIS is riding on, we’ve uploaded that satellite, changed the software and added capabilities multiple times, from the ground,” Boutelle said. Over the coming years, IRIS will support the deployment of a truly mobile network that allows users to connect and communicate how, when and where they need to, and that continuously adapts to changing needs without depending on a fixed terrestrial infrastructure. This technology will transform how government agencies and commercial organizations use IP-based network services to accomplish their missions, Boutelle said. O For more information, contact MIT Editor Harrison Donnelly at harrisond@kmimediagroup.com or search our online archives for related stories at www.mit-kmi.com.
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