The Army is continuing to work on ways to merge intelligence traffic onto the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T) network.
The idea is to save money and satellite bandwidth by channeling intelligence and command and control traffic over the same network.
A three-phase plan for "transport convergence" was approved in 2012. Phase I will be the transition of traffic onto WIN-T Increments 1b and 2, according to an Army news release. This convergence is slated to displace the current 207 TROJAN Special Purpose Integrated Remote Intelligence Terminal Lightweight Intelligence Telecommunications Equipment (TROJAN SPIRIT LITE) in tactical units.
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"We don't have unlimited bandwidth or unlimited resources, so this would provide one less system that the Soldier has to focus on in the field," said Lt. Col Thomas Addyman, chief for the Cyber Center of Excellence's Live Experimentation Branch, at Fort Gordon, Georgia. "If we do it right, it will be transparent to them. Hopefully, we'll gain some efficiency."
Engineers from the Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC)'s C4ISR Ground Activity developed test plans that used operational workflows and real-world intelligence traffic to assess how network congestion impacts the execution of Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A) workflows on WIN-T Increment 1B and Increment 2.
"Going into this assessment, there was no definitive data to say how much data DCGS-A will use," said Adam McCauley, chief of CERDEC's C4ISR Ground Activity systems engineering and integration branch. "We have different pictures that give us aggregates of data, but we didn't know things like how much bandwidth is needed for an application or task in DCGS-A."
Participating in the project are the Cyber Center of Excellence, the Army Intelligence Center of Excellence, Program Executive Office Intelligence, Electronic Warfare & Sensors, Program Executive Office Command, Control and Communications-Tactical, Project Manager WIN-T, Project Manager DCGS-A, Product Manager Prophet, Army Test and Evaluation Command Electronic Proving Ground, and CERDEC's Intelligence and Information Warfare Directorate and Space and Terrestrial Communications Directorate.
