Advanced airborne military communications architectures enabled by commercial broadband satellite communications

Abstract

The advent of commercial broadband satellite communications systems and services for in-flight civil aircraft provides the opportunity to enable advanced military communications architectures sooner than government-planned systems and associated bandwidth will be available. Application of these commercial systems/services to MILSATCOM architectures and concept of operations is discussed herein. These newly evolving satcom technologies for commercial aviation applications provide national and international governmental departments additional options to supplement supporting ever-expanding requirements in the rapidly changing "information age". The need to "keep up" with technology, which has life cycles of 12 to 18 months, versus the fielding of major new MILSATCOM infrastructure with life cycles of 10 - 25 years, leaves governments at tremendous shortfall in capability versus demand. Even with new programs fielded, the exponential growth of bandwidth requirements, as exemplified by the Internet, points to the need to supplement non-mission critical communications to other than high demand, mission critical government unique MILSATCOM assets. These new commercial broadband SATCOM systems and services offer the chance to "bridge the gap" between existing capabilities and future government programs while providing valuable operational experience that can be applied to those future programs. Moreover, the commercial broadband SATCOM systems/services can enable new communications architectures that help meet the "network centric warfare", global information grid connectivity, and real-time data requirements that exist today.