Extending the Mission: NATO AEW Beyond Line-of-Sight Airborne IP Communications.

摘要

Recent progress by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) Consultation, Command and Control (C3) Agency (NC3A) Scientific and Technical Support (STS) team has achieved some significant results towards implementing a viable beyond line-of-sight internet protocol (IP) communications capability on board the NATO E-3A airborne warning and control system (AWACS) aircraft. The NATO Airborne Early Warning and Control (NAEW&C) Force Command (FC) sponsored this activity with the purpose of fulfilling mission critical requirements to support current and future NATO mission tasking. Following introduction and background material, our paper describes potential future missions that drive the pressing capability requirement. We describe next the communications system description with its deployable ground entry point (DGEP), and the IP network architecture for communicating with the NE3A aircraft. We discuss concept development tests and experiments used to verify system functionality and performance, including ground- and flight- testing, and results from the Multi- Sensor Aerospace-Ground Joint Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, (ISR) Interoperability Coalition (MAJIIC) - Technical Interoperability Experiment (TIE) (MAJIIC-TIE). We address a number of issues and challenges we discovered, some with operational impact, including limitations due to bandwidth and latency, Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) 'chattiness', link connectivity loss during refuelling and turns, and issues related to the fact that the aircraft has never before operated with an organic ground element. The next section proposes future enhancements to overcome these issues including, in order of increasing complexity and cost, strategies to optimise low bandwidth utilization and traffic management (such as load splitting over different carriers), and integrating alternative higher bandwidth bearers such as INMARSAT, UHF SATCOM, and broad band SATCOM.