Cameron Davidson
"GIG BE is a wonderful instance of planning ahead. This leap forward will keep us in good stead for years to come," DISA's Tony Montemarano says.

It's been a rallying cry for uniforms and suits alike at the Defense Department-for literally decades. With the full rollout of the Global Information Grid-Bandwidth Expansion program at 86 sites late last year, a lot of bandwidth arrived. Now, DOD's charge is to make the most efficient use of it.

In fact, it's already happening. In the weeks after hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged portions of the Gulf Coast, for instance, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency used the high-bandwidth, GIG-BE network to push out satellite images of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas to disaster recovery teams.

GIG-BE has also begun providing connectivity for the Army Knowledge Online portal, which will become the Defense-wide Web portal, says Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Croom Jr., director of the Defense Information Systems Agency.

During the past three years under the $860 million GIG-BE program, DISA has built a Synchronous Optical Network with throughput of 10 Gbps, or SONET OC-192. That's a big step up for most DOD organizations, where transmission speeds have ranged from T1 service of 1.5 Mbps to OC-48 of 2.4 Gbps. To deliver this data pipe, GIG-BE relies on optical mesh networks created by a team of vendors, as well as some services leased through the Defense Information System Network program. GIG-BE is the conduit to bring network power to the edge-removing a barrier to real-time data availability to any DOD user anywhere in the world.

"The technical challenges faced by FORCEnet and the GIG together are the same challenges faced by all of Defense, industry and the Internet." -Navy's Charles Suggs

TOWARD THE FUTURE
"GIG-BE will be the super highway of information," says Tony Montemarano, who just this month left his post as GIG-BE program director to take on the job of joint program executive officer for network operations and security at DISA. "With GIG-BE, it is a wonderful instance of planning ahead. This leap forward will keep us in good stead for years to come."

Defense envisions GIG-BE as a tool to connect troops to operations around the world and to improve national security intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Montemarano says the long-term benefits will be enormous. Removing bandwidth limitations will boost situational awareness, speed the ability of commands to take action and give deployed users access to critical visual, spatial and graphic information, he says. The 10-Gbps throughput is going to bases, posts and stations that need high-speed data exchange capability for warfighting operations, he adds.

The Defense fiber contractors have laid down dozens of strands of fiber, Montemarano says. Defense bought two strands solely for GIG-BE traffic. "We ride inside a vendor's cable plant, and those two strands are dedicated to the government," Montemarano says. This means multiple users will be able to download simultaneously and more work can get done, Montemarano says. "We have put in more bandwidth to prevent congestion. Even so, there is a big workload, with pressure to act as promptly as possible."

Note those words "future" and "big workload" because delivering the bandwidth might prove to have been the easiest part of GIG-BE. Montemarano acknowledges that. As he steps up to his new job, he leaves a road map for the GIG-BE team composed of four chief directives: tackle security issues that worry users; deliver the technology needed to leverage the available bandwidth; build in quality of service to surpass legacy network services; and work closely with the armed services so that implementation remains consistent.

The GIG-BE program and the Defense Information Systems Network Office will now become one organization so that DISA can optimize the existing DISN and new GIG-BE infrastructures, he says. "The DISN today largely is supported by leased bandwidth, whereas GIG-BE now owns the bandwidth," Montemarano explains. "We're trying to get rid of the leased services."

Defense views GIG-BE as its enabler of network-centric warfare and the foundation for transformation of the GIG transport layer. Here's the DOD-speak from the department's 2005 budget plan: "Removing current bandwidth limitations provides the catalyst for self-synchronization, shared situational awareness, sustainability, and speed of command and action, allowing those closest to the reality of combat full access to a rich and enabling set of information assets."

JOB ONE
But Defense is not there yet. As much as DOD brass demands bandwidth, it also frets about security in the network-centric environment of the GIG. When the initial GIG-BE deployments began at sites in late 2004, the backbone network became a target of critics who questioned whether GIG-BE would provide substantial additional capacity to support classified data and whether it would be as secure as Defense's existing networks.

Responding to the chatter within DOD ranks, lawmakers asked for a review by the Congressional Budget Office. And in February of last year, CBO issued a report about the program's design and capabilities.

After reviewing the system and concerns of critics, the CBO concluded that GIG-BE's capacity for transporting encrypted traffic eventually will double that available via legacy networks. The report also concluded that no reasons exist to prefer those existing networks to GIG-BE when it comes to technological approaches for ensuring confidentiality.

Montemarano says DISA will constantly be addressing GIG-BE security concerns. "Encryption has to be bigger and faster," he says. "It is a hard and very large challenge. The data running across must be secure. We have to come to grips with the security of data." To encrypt classified data and separate it from unclassified traffic, GIG-BE uses high-assurance IP encryption and virtual private networks, which let both data types traverse a common infrastructure. Montemarano says classified data is secure under GIG-BE, acknowledging there is work to be done on the unclassified side.

THE TECH EDGE
But there are concerns other than security. Defense has multiple vendors using modeling and simulation software to study how to make GIG-BE a fine-tuned machine. For instance, Opnet Technologies Inc. of Bethesda, Md., has designed pre-deployment testing simulations for applications that will rely on GIG-BE.

"Providing bandwidth is one huge step in the right direction," Opnet CEO Marc Cohen says. "You look at the applications that reach out to battlefields and that tend to have high impact on performance."

Even more critical, Cohen says, is the ability to learn how to craft apps that run well in the "distributed nature of the environment and deal well with the latency that is between computing centers."

By testing apps and tweaking them for performance on GIG-BE, Defense sites that need data on battle management or logistics, for example, can be assured that the programs support "much faster decision-making," Cohen says. "We are essentially opening up the capability to operate."

While Cohen's contention may be true, it is also true that the new ability creates a battlefield technology conundrum, according to military service officials. As yet, DOD has not figured out how to bridge the near-real-time sensor weapon control environment and the non-real-time IP environment to create a net-centric "infostructure" for deployed users, says Charles Suggs, technical director for networks and communications for FORCEnet, the Navy portion of GIG. "The technical challenges faced by FORCEnet and the GIG together are the same challenges faced by all of Defense, industry and the Internet," Suggs says.

ASAP ON QOS
Another area requiring more work is quality of service. In its report, CBO yielded on the quality issue and said that initially GIG-BE cannot provide all of the service features that Defense users have come to expect from their networks.

As GIG-BE capabilities expand, a chief DISA focus will be to provide those levels of service, Montemarano says. Although GIG-BE is not providing all of those features now, the potential exists to meet them in the future, he says.

Specifically, DISA is working on the transmission of voice and video data, which requires fewer lost packets and less latency, Montemarano says. There is inconsistency in service across the GIG. The transmission of voice and video data in real time can tolerate little loss or delay among users, compared with the transmission of e-mail data, he explains.

"Our biggest challenge is to migrate voice and video to the infrastructure," Montemarano says. "To get it to a high quality is what we are moving to; we need to have quality of service."

	Robert Burroughs
	"In the long term, FORCEnet expects to leverage GIG capabilities in order to reallocate resources to other naval requirements," Navy Cmdr. Patrick G. Roche says.

GROWING PAINS
Though Defense's unveiling of network service with a throughput of 10 Gbps is a big bandwidth boost for the military services, DISA must continue to get buy-in from commanders and top brass, Montemarano and Suggs agree.

The services' leaders expect a rough childhood for GIG-BE. Why? Because there is inconsistent implementation of standards across the industry and Defense organizations, and different interpretations exist, Suggs says. DISA and the GIG teams in the services are well aware of this problem, he says, and are working to build consensus on service-oriented and component-based characteristics for GIG enterprise services.

The Navy has connected its architecture framework, FORCEnet, into GIG-BE, which acts as a "significant external driver," says Cmdr. Patrick G. Roche, deputy of architecture and human systems at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command in San Diego.

"GIG-BE directly affects FORCEnet's advancement by establishing the standards for service-oriented net-centric warfare, bandwidth growth and core enterprise services," Roche says. "In the long term, FORCEnet expects to leverage GIG capabilities in order to reallocate resources to other naval requirements."

The Army and Air Force have comparable initiatives. At the Army, the GIG-BE rollout is taking over network services for the Installation Information Infrastructure Modernization Program, the service's voice, data and cable enterprise infrastructure. At the Air Force, it's the Combat Information Transport System.

FULL SPEED AHEAD
By bringing in GIG-BE, the services' bases are benefiting from higher capacity of data, voice and video for their personnel, Montemarano says. "The distribution on the bases has been very positive."

Roche says he can see how the GIG-BE program will advance FORCEnet in the future by simplifying Defense's terrestrial communications infrastructure. "The quality of service will support many capabilities that define FORCEnet, including more efficient bandwidth management and information availability," Roche says.

Even as Defense is tackling GIG-BE's technological and cultural challenges, Montemarano says, the expanded bandwidth capabilities will leverage the department's existing information transportation capabilities and expand communications reliability to sites around the globe.

There is particular emphasis on that unity today with Defense's broader effort to give its own organizations the ability to work jointly with one another and to work with civilian agencies on homeland security initiatives. As an example, Montemarano says that "for the intelligence community, this will bring us all together."

And by providing GIG-BE to military sites, officers in the field will be able to make quicker decisions based on information at their fingertips-data on logistics, battle management and other of-the-moment field reports.

"We will have systems that feed into GIG-BE and get us away from the circuit-connected Internet way," Montemarano says. "It brings an awful lot of demand to the infrastructure."

purchase reprint

link to this page