Digital Battlespace
AFCEA West 2012: US Army expands radio networks
Following two recent successful rounds of US Army exercises for its Mobile Ad hoc Interoperability Network Gateway (MAINGATE) radio system, Raytheon has outlined what it will be demonstrating during the Network Integration Evaluation (NIE) phase 12.2.
Speaking to Shephard at a pre-AFCEA West briefing on 18 January, Jeff Miller, director of Raytheon Network Centric Systems' Tactical Communication Systems, said the system ‘outperformed competitors’ during the NIE 12.1 at Fort Bliss, Texas, in November and the Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiment (AEWE) at Fort Benning, Georgia, in October.
‘We have not seen a formal report yet [from NIE]. The biggest thing we are focused on is a demonstration in a broader context. When you think about the MANET [mobile ad hoc network], the more nodes that you have on that network the more robust it can be,’ Miller said about the last and future testing.
‘If I can start to field an entire battalion, somewhere between 30 and 50 radios, from a robustness standpoint, that’s great, but the challenge of some of the other systems...is that as you add those nodes there is an overhead associated every time you make the network bigger. And other systems have had trouble integrating more nodes into the network.’
Raytheon is doing its own testing to demonstrate 30-50 nodes and in turn a more robust network, and ‘one of the objectives for us in 12.2 is to demonstrate up to 50 nodes operating together’, Miller said.
‘We’ve heard some feedback that the army is looking to enable its battle command on the move to simplify how some of the data is displayed; that’s not actually part of our system but we will facilitate the other systems to do that,’ Miller explained, and said that integrating WIN-T, the US Army’s warfighter information network, is also a future aim.
‘MAINGATE is a mid-tier network. We provide that bridge between trying to get data down to the soldier. A key to that is bridging to the WIN-T network, a programme of record that is part of the army’s baseline network. We’ve demonstrated that interoperability with WIN-T during 12.1; 12.2 is very focused on testing WIN-T so we’ll broaden our link to WIN-T as part of that test.
‘There are things they want to see, the demonstration of more nodes, more of the ability to provide that mid-tier networking between WIN-T and the soldiers, and potentially looking at displaying the data differently for battle command on the move.’
The system is designed to operate up to 128 nodes, and uses its own waveform that serves as a network. Raytheon believes it provides ten times more capability than competing systems: ‘It can be used in many functions, but our goal is to always be so the soldier doesn’t even know it exists,’ Miller said.
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