By Ann Roosevelt
The Boeing [BA]-developed Joint Tactical Radio System Ground Mobile Radios (JTRS GMR) is conducting tests aiming toward a limited user test in mid- 2010 and on to a production review in 2011, company officials said.
Boeing is the prime contractor for the JTRS GMR program and is developing the Wideband Networking Waveform (WNW) under contract to the Joint Program Executive Office Network Enterprise Domain.
The WNW-enabled, multichannel JTRS GMR will be installed in current and future U.S. Army vehicles, to provide warfighters with networked voice, video and data communications on the move.
“The GMR and WNW waveform as integrated program element continues to move forward, we’re nearing completion of the development part of the program,” John Lunardi, vice president of Networks and Communications Systems for Boeing’s C3 Networks division, told Defense Daily in an interview.
The program is in functional qualification tests for various waveforms, and entering production qualification tests, plans for the required security verification testing, he said.
“In the middle-part of next year we’ll be in systems integration test and limited user test and then leading our way to Milestone C in the early part of 2011, moving forward very quickly and very successfully I might add,” Lunardi said.
One of the challenges of a mobile ad hoc network is scale. The Army wanted to prove that the radios and waveforms could be scaled up or down. That was proved out in a government-conducted test in June.
“The technology really hung together,” Lunardi said. “It was a successful test, we’ve got a lot of good feedback from our customers so that test was another building block in the development program that validated that “this technology is real, that it works and it’s really going to provide a revolutionary capability to warfighters.”
In addition to work on the program of record, there’s a lot of effort going into how to “hang” the networks together, he said. For example, the Soldier Radio Waveform (SRW) will be on handheld devices–how will that interact with the GMR’s WNW network, and how it will operate in an airborne environment.
As the platform the network resides on matures, there is less risk as development moves forward.
“Now we’re entering a phase where we’re actually going to deploy these networks,” he said. “And how the network operates, how the network is secured, how the networks are managed, how they interoperate with each other is a pretty significant undertaking and we’re just evolving into this period as we deploy these systems.”
For warfighters in harsh terrain without the wired infrastructure, information is key to successful missions, and that was demonstrated from June-September at the C4ISR On The Move Event 09 demonstration at Ft. Dix, N.J.
“Boeing was able to combine out platform expertise. We had an AH-64 Apache out there and we put one of our wideband networking radios on it,” Deborah Wilson, director of Advanced Networks and Communications Systems for Boeing Phantom Works, said.
“We also had a radio up in a tower, they formed an airborne network. That airborne network transmitted video and data and chat messages to the ground [tactical operations center] TOC and also to a network of Humvees that were driving around. We had several networks running the wideband networking waveform, and then we connected those to the Soldier Radio Network, those where the soldier was carrying a handheld, and we also interconnected to the WIN-T network, and the connection it gives back to CONUS over satellite.
Boeing with Army and other vendors was to connect these networks. “We had some good success” when these various nets moved around,” she said.
For example, when handheld radios with SRN moved away from each other “they split in two, and were only able to connect through WNW, so our gateways were able to prove healing- -healing is when two networks disconnect, and are reconnected, or healed, through another network,” she said. “Then we proved that when WNW networks moved apart from each other [as vehicles drove around] they were healed through the WIN-T network. That was a key capability with these IP-type networks.”
Lunardi said a significant part of the developing capability is the security aspect, being connected to the Global Information Grid (GIG) in battle in a mobile environment. Loosing vehicles or compromises to the networks “clearly drives a lot of the cost and complexity of the network.”
“What this network does is it allows us to have a tactical edge battlefield network with no cell towers, no fiber optics,” he said.
Soldiers don’t notice any of the software action taking place, Wilson said. “The wideband networking waveform is a very complex piece of software, with the capability of doing things like routing and healing and it is a new capability, so that you don’t need a lot of hardware. It’s all in the software right there in the radio, and you don’t need the expensive infrastructure of the Internet. It provides all of that part automatically so the user can’t even tell when they’re connected via different network”
The experiment also allowed hooking Boeing’s network manager to different networks, so regardless of whether it was an SRW network or WIN-T network or WNW, we were able to show what happening on that network at one terminal,” she said.
Network management across disparate networks is key, and Boeing has invested considerable research dollars into achieving this capability, Wilson said.
“We have really proven now we can connect networks,” she said. “Once you have that infrastructure in place they can start thinking about how to use the network and what kinds of operations are we going to achieve connectivity. And it really expands of our imagination.”
Lunardi said there is some discussion about the JTRS GMR program and others about what can be accelerated or deployed more quickly. If the services decide they want to accelerate, or do some level of testing real-time, Boeing would support that.
“The program of record, the hardware, the operating environment and the waveform are approaching finish line,” he said. “It’s demonstrating the kind of throughput and performance we expected and good validation by users both in the 30 node tests and the experiments.”