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[infowar.de] US Army implementiert drahtloses Netz WIN-T (Mobile IP) für Bewegungskrieg
Infowar.de, http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~bendrath/liste.html
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Worum es bei dem "Warfighter Information Network-Tactical" (WIN-T) geht,
hat Jim Quinn von Lockheed Martin, die eines der beiden
Industriekonsortien führen, schön gesagt: "The whole notion of
mobility."
Das andere Konsortium wird geführt von General Dynamics C4 Systems.
RB
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2002/0930/tec-wint-09-30-02.asp
Army WIN-T takes tech on the road
Mobile IP lets users stay connected to roaming, mobile network
BY Brian Robinson Sept. 30, 2002
The Army's Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T) program could
provide just as much value for a wide range of civilian activities as it
will for soldiers on the battlefield, demonstrating how mobile
networking technology can be applied to everything from transportation
to disaster relief.
WIN-T eventually will provide soldiers on the battlefield with modern,
high-speed communications and real-time voice, video and data services.
To achieve that goal, teams working on the program will leverage
standards-based technologies such as Mobile IP, which enables people to
use a permanent IP address to connect to a roaming, wireless network.
But to get from here to there will take work, not least because the
traditional notion of battlefield networking - cables linked to antennas
that take time to install and pull down - runs counter to the notion of
a mobile force.
"That's the technology challenge of this program," said Jim Quinn, WIN-T
program manager for Lockheed Martin Mission Systems. "The whole notion
of mobility."
Lockheed Martin is the leader of one of the teams that in August were
awarded $75 million contracts for the first two phases of the WIN-T
development. The other team is led by General Dynamics C4 Systems.
Both teams will compete to be the sole developer of the 15-year WIN-T
program, valued at more than $6 billion. Phase One will last a year,
during which both teams will define an architecture for WIN-T. In the
two-year second phase, the teams will test their architectures and
develop a prototype for the Army to test.
The Army has stipulated that the bulk of the WIN-T development be based
on commercial off-the-shelf, standards-based technologies. So the
network's core design will have to depend on standards that already
exist or are close to completion.
The main technology now in play is Mobile IP, which was standardized as
far back as 1996 for use in the Internet Engineering Task Force's IPv4.
An updated and more robust version of Mobile IP is being considered for
use in IPv6, the latest iteration of the IP standard.
"Mobile IP allows a device [connected to a wireless IP-based network] to
keep a permanent IP address, even though it may be roaming from one hot
spot to another," said Mark McCabe, regional manager for Army programs
at Cisco Systems Inc., a member of the Lockheed Martin WIN-T team.
Higher-level network protocols, such as Transmission Control Protocol,
need the IP address to identify users, and the TCP connection is broken
if the IP address changes.
That will be important for soldiers using WIN-T because, as they move
across the varied terrain of the battlefield, their network access could
at any time be provided through third-generation cellular, 802.11
wireless local-area networks, and satellite data transmissions. If their
mobile data devices were required to give up their IP address each time
they switched from one part of the network to another, the network would
drop them.
Mobile IP use is not yet widespread, though organizations that have used
it say its application in the government and military fields is obvious.
In particular, companies such as Cisco can use it to write code that
enables a router to completely control connections to the mobile
network, rather than hosts sitting on the network that need special
software, said Will Ivancic, a senior research engineer at the NASA
Glenn Research Center.
"We've demonstrated the ability for a router to do that, both in the lab
and out in the field," Ivancic said. "That's attractive from the
military standpoint, because it's a relatively easy thing to secure
since only the router needs to be protected."
As probably the first major use of mobile networking, WIN-T will
demonstrate mobile technology's value for use on ships, in airplanes,
for disaster relief "and for anything that has a network that is
moving," Ivancic said.
Robinson is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Ore. He can be
reached at hullite -!
- mindspring -
com -
***
Clear Channels
The Army hopes the end result of the Warfighter Information
Network-Tactical program will be a system that can deliver a steady data
rate of 256 kilobits/sec to soldiers who could be standing still or in a
vehicle bouncing across the battlefield at high speeds. The current
mobile subscriber equipment tri-service tactical system can deliver
bandwidth of only 16 kilobits/sec to 25 kilobits/sec to lower echelons,
and even that is shared.
The final WIN-T system will employ a form of "ad hoc networking," said
Ray Dolan, director of government markets for General Dynamics C4
Systems, in which the network can form and reform automatically on the
fly.
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