Read My Lips
Video Teleconferencing Allows Not Only the Words to Be Heard
But the People and Environment to Be Seen.
by Adam Baddeley, SOTECH Correspondent
Video Teleconferencing (VTC) has become synonymous with modern warfighter command and made possible by increased satcom bandwidth, available to users on-the-pause and increasing on-the-move, enabling the commander’s intent to be effectively conveyed in an interactive two-way discussion.
DoD continues to balance VTC acquisition between offthe- shelf solutions and in-house approaches to meet increased demand for VTC in the war on terror with increasing pressure to push this capability from division down to company-level. Reflecting VTC’s now permanent role in command structures, the DoD is now obliging JITC certification for new products before they are fielded.
The Army has looked to itself as a source for VTC. “The battlefield VTC (BVTC) is a complete Army system. It came down through one of the local program managers here and was developed and built wholly through CERDEC [Communication-Electronics Research, Development & Engineering Center] at Fort Monmouth, [N.J.]” explained John Harrington, project leader for BVTC at CERDEC’s Space & Terrestrial Communications Directorate, the design-build entity for BVTC for PM TRCS.
BVTC consists of two main subsets of equipment, the AN/TYQ- 122 user terminal, based around a rugged GETAC laptop operating the ubiquitous H.264 VTC codec, and the transit case-based network services terminal that Harrington dubs the “BITS Box,” which provides the network services, multi-point control unit, gateway and gatekeeper functionality.
The BVTC program began in 2000 from a need to address a requirements gap in the Army Common User System Modernization upgrade of the Army’s Mobile Subscriber Equipment. “There was no VTC system on the shelf that would suit all of our requirements,” Harrington explained. “A lot of our requirements lay with our need to deal with ruggedization and multiple protocols, both for both legacy system and future deployments.”
First fielding of the BVTC was to the First Digitized Division— 4ID—at Fort Hood, which began in spring 2001. The system subsequently became part of the “Bridge to Future Networks,” capabilities production document in 2005 that has put the CERDEC system into WIN-T Inc 1. To reflect its mainstream status and to streamline the logistics, BVTC components are now being sourced from a common hardware/software program.
Today there are currently 350 user terminals and 250 BITS Boxes in the field with units that include the 4ID, 3ID, 10th Mountain Division and 82nd Airborne. There are currently orders for a further 75 suites of equipment. This has provided enormous insight into user needs and has prompted the systems to evolve. Harrington said, “As part of our program we constantly seek feedback from training sessions and from our users in the field. We also have field engineers who follow on and do a lot of training in the field with the soldiers and provide us with the detailed feedback we need to upgrade the systems. In doing so we have had two iterations of the system, and we are on the third, which will be fielded with WIN-T Inc. 1.” The current system has gone through the JITC process and Harrington expects this latest version to be certified on the DISN network by the summer.
To meet field conditions, BVTC has from the onset been designed for real battlefield conditions. Harrington said, “We are able to test and modify if needed the codec compression that is involved with the VTC so we are able to use relatively low bandwidth requirements to achieve business quality VTC. It may not be the preferred, but it is certainly acceptable. We are able to operate down at 128 Kbps for an acceptable VTC.”
WITH OIF FROM THE BEGINNING
Aethra’s 8500 rack-mounted integrated multipoint conferencing unit and the Vega X5 set top are the standard tactical VTC units offered to the military, according to Ed Markey, director of government sales, Aethra Telecommunications. Aethra supplies secure VTCs for all of Army’s V Corp comprising 1st Infantry Division 1st Armored Division—roughly 140 VTC systems over the past four years following a run-off against other VTC offerings.
“[V Corps] did a tactical simulation test which is encompassed line degradation hits on a network, replicating a typical tactical world environment where communication lines are not real stable. When they did the test as network, we kept an audio 3. Our competitors dropped out long before were selected to be the Corps.”
Aethra’s 8400 standard tactical codec VTC equipment was integrated by General Dynamics into tracked command vehicle General [William S.] Wallace, commander of V Corps, minutes, making it ready go right from the beginning of operations in Iraq. said, “We ran our equipment 140 degree heat. Every engineers would get an blow the sand and we one failure.”
After success with V being used to run the Iraq-Command, in Iraq since the beginning of the war, others adopted Aethra’s solution entering service with the Army’s 21st Theater Command, Kaiserslautern, Germany, building a fall-back command center there with Lockheed Martin. Others included U.S. Army Southern European Task Force (SETAF) Joint Task Force Headquarters in Italy and Multi-National Corps-Iraq.
Markey cites Aethra’s performance over poor communications links as the major reason for this success. “I can run at 64 Kbps, and 128 Kbps. The military doesn’t have enough bandwidth, so the lower bandwidth that you can run with and still keep good video quality is critical. Our codec can take imagery from high-resolution imagery satellites because our data channel speed is up to 10 times faster than our competitors.”
DoD is making Joint Interoperability Test Command Test Command (JITC) certification for COTS TVC mandatory in 2008 in order to join DoD’s approved product list. Aethra intends to be the first commercial manufacturer to pass this milestone, according to Markey. “I just got back from Fort Huachuca after two weeks of testing. We have gone through the Standard Telecommunications Interoperability Group test, the IP hacker test and others. We will become be the first VTC manufacturer to get through the new standards through the JITC, standards after our final test finish 21st February.”
INFORMATION ASSURANCE
“The major issue with the use of commercially available VTC products by military organizations in the U.S. is the integration of the encryption gear to ensure compliance with accreditation authorities at the individual facilities,” said Barry Goldin, director of systems integration at Audio Video Systems, Inc. (AVS).
There are two primary means of communication for VTC: dial up and IP. The legacy base with DoD is heavily dial-up. In 1997, AVS developed their AVSIM-366 product that simplified the dialing process. Previously, most people had used an IMUX to bond calls, requiring users to have to directly dial calls at the IMUX, which is a complicated task and precluded the use of the codec’s phonebook and simplified dialing capability.
"That was very complicated," explained Goldin. “Integration of from the codec itself other feature where is transferred to the stream is separated out the encryption gear. allows for the call to be established, the data stream encrypted and the dialing be isolated so that maintain the security of the overall system. Previously people didn’t dialing stream because couldn’t isolate it.” AVS also enable switching secure and non-secure use across DoD.
The second generation product was released in 2004 the dial isolation as bypass switching into a single-rack mount chassis. This allowed for RS-232 remote control and relay indication of status and was another large step forward in the ease of use and level of integration.
Goldin believes the challenge going forward is that now, more and more people are using IP-based VTC in a DoD environment. “That is both good and bad,” he explained. “In some cases, they are using a dedicated network, and they will want to connect a VTC to their dedicated secret or top secret network. With this configuration you have to ensure isolation is supported so that information in one network doesn’t transfer to another. We have been working with clients on this requirement and have fielded approximately 50 systems that address the problem where we allow connectivity to their classified network, as well as access to secure and non-secure dial up solutions, all from a touch panel display.
AVS is investigating a next generation product that will extend the ease of use and integration by allowing people to switch between multiple IP networks across unclassified, secret and top secret. Right now, solutions switch between IP and a dial up capability. “The customer might want all three levels of IP connected, which clearly you can’t do without a lot of isolation,” explained Goldin.
“When we are integrating a total solution, there are a lot of things that come into play. In a command center, a conference room or even a smaller environment, if I am connecting an unclassified VTC, my control system cannot allow information from a secret PC in the corner to be displayed,” explained Goldin. “There is a level of source restriction and user control in our solution which brings the entire system to the level of security that the call is being made at. This ensures you don’t send a graphic from a PC that is showing classified information. Different isolation techniques are used to guarantee to the accrediting authority that no release of classified information will occur and if you are making a secret call, you isolate the top secret. You always have to err on the side of caution.”
ISSUES AND SOLUTIONS
Erik Werner, senior technologist at Tandberg Federal, identified three major impediments to battlefield real-time video networks that all manufacturers must address, “The first is the network itself, bandwidth variances and topology—SAT, RF, terrestrial, etc. The second is communicating across domains and theaters while the last being once you have setup the pathways, how do you find someone on the network.” The company ends up solving these problems for users across DoD, “Every major combatant command uses our technology as well as the Intel community and similar communities of interest. Almost every agency in the U.S. federal government uses Tandberg technology in one form or another.”
Ensuring connectivity when the network may be suffering hits isn’t being addressed by a single quick-fix but via the implementation of a variety of automatic standards-based elements, including intelligent packet loss recovery (IPLR), downspeeding and automatic algorithm negotiation.
“From the warfighter’s perspective, the mission continues because the communications do,” said Werner, “The ability to communicate across theaters and domains were done with the help of Tandberg firewall traversal technology found in the Tandberg Border Controller and Tandberg Gatekeeper. Both use standards-based H.460.18 and H.460.19 to perform this task as well as other methods. This successfully allows the warfighter to seamlessly connect with other members regardless of where they reside on the battlefield network. The last part of finding people was done with the help of Tandberg FindMe technology in conjunction with our ability to distribute phonebooks to the video endpoints. FindMe allows the network to place multiple calls to multiple places in order to find the corresponding person. Phonebooks are just that; a published white pages making it easier to locate an individual.”
Werner identified the “unified communications space” as the “area where we see the most amount of interest, both generated from the user community and industry alike. What you will continue to see out of Tandberg are products that stress our three main philosophies. These are reliability, ease of use and scalability. All three pillars help drive the development of products and software that come together and provide one main focus for our customers; and that is to meet their mission-critical communication needs.”
“The key aspect of the SeaTac VTC Communicator family, is that it is enclosed in very small briefcase structure. You open the briefcase and you have your LCD screen on the top part of the briefcase and all the guts of the VTC system in the bottom. The rear has all the ports that you plug into,” explained Eric Thompson, president and CEO of Seavio LLC . The design originated from a requirement initiated by the U.S. military, Thompson continued, “We built a series of this product and delivered it to them and that was the launch of the product. “The system is built around the Tandberg 880 VTC platform which is then integrated by Seavio with modifications to electronic sub systems to aid deployability in the field such as battery back up and a redesign of the camera to operate in the small enclosure.
“The biggest contributor in terms of new technology relates to two elements. One of them is form factor—size and weight. We continue to push the envelope in terms of the actual form factor and size of the deployable component that is going out in the field. The other is power and electronics; we have an efficient and highly developed power platform to accept multiple power inputs in terms of autosensing. You can plug in anything to the platform and the system will sense the power you are plugging into and allow you to run off the power, whether it be 10-30V DC or 100-240V AC, and continue to operate in the fielded environment.” ♦
DoD continues to balance VTC acquisition between offthe- shelf solutions and in-house approaches to meet increased demand for VTC in the war on terror with increasing pressure to push this capability from division down to company-level. Reflecting VTC’s now permanent role in command structures, the DoD is now obliging JITC certification for new products before they are fielded.
The Army has looked to itself as a source for VTC. “The battlefield VTC (BVTC) is a complete Army system. It came down through one of the local program managers here and was developed and built wholly through CERDEC [Communication-Electronics Research, Development & Engineering Center] at Fort Monmouth, [N.J.]” explained John Harrington, project leader for BVTC at CERDEC’s Space & Terrestrial Communications Directorate, the design-build entity for BVTC for PM TRCS.
BVTC consists of two main subsets of equipment, the AN/TYQ- 122 user terminal, based around a rugged GETAC laptop operating the ubiquitous H.264 VTC codec, and the transit case-based network services terminal that Harrington dubs the “BITS Box,” which provides the network services, multi-point control unit, gateway and gatekeeper functionality.
The BVTC program began in 2000 from a need to address a requirements gap in the Army Common User System Modernization upgrade of the Army’s Mobile Subscriber Equipment. “There was no VTC system on the shelf that would suit all of our requirements,” Harrington explained. “A lot of our requirements lay with our need to deal with ruggedization and multiple protocols, both for both legacy system and future deployments.”
First fielding of the BVTC was to the First Digitized Division— 4ID—at Fort Hood, which began in spring 2001. The system subsequently became part of the “Bridge to Future Networks,” capabilities production document in 2005 that has put the CERDEC system into WIN-T Inc 1. To reflect its mainstream status and to streamline the logistics, BVTC components are now being sourced from a common hardware/software program.
Today there are currently 350 user terminals and 250 BITS Boxes in the field with units that include the 4ID, 3ID, 10th Mountain Division and 82nd Airborne. There are currently orders for a further 75 suites of equipment. This has provided enormous insight into user needs and has prompted the systems to evolve. Harrington said, “As part of our program we constantly seek feedback from training sessions and from our users in the field. We also have field engineers who follow on and do a lot of training in the field with the soldiers and provide us with the detailed feedback we need to upgrade the systems. In doing so we have had two iterations of the system, and we are on the third, which will be fielded with WIN-T Inc. 1.” The current system has gone through the JITC process and Harrington expects this latest version to be certified on the DISN network by the summer.
To meet field conditions, BVTC has from the onset been designed for real battlefield conditions. Harrington said, “We are able to test and modify if needed the codec compression that is involved with the VTC so we are able to use relatively low bandwidth requirements to achieve business quality VTC. It may not be the preferred, but it is certainly acceptable. We are able to operate down at 128 Kbps for an acceptable VTC.”
WITH OIF FROM THE BEGINNING
Aethra’s 8500 rack-mounted integrated multipoint conferencing unit and the Vega X5 set top are the standard tactical VTC units offered to the military, according to Ed Markey, director of government sales, Aethra Telecommunications. Aethra supplies secure VTCs for all of Army’s V Corp comprising 1st Infantry Division 1st Armored Division—roughly 140 VTC systems over the past four years following a run-off against other VTC offerings.
“[V Corps] did a tactical simulation test which is encompassed line degradation hits on a network, replicating a typical tactical world environment where communication lines are not real stable. When they did the test as network, we kept an audio 3. Our competitors dropped out long before were selected to be the Corps.”
Aethra’s 8400 standard tactical codec VTC equipment was integrated by General Dynamics into tracked command vehicle General [William S.] Wallace, commander of V Corps, minutes, making it ready go right from the beginning of operations in Iraq. said, “We ran our equipment 140 degree heat. Every engineers would get an blow the sand and we one failure.”
After success with V being used to run the Iraq-Command, in Iraq since the beginning of the war, others adopted Aethra’s solution entering service with the Army’s 21st Theater Command, Kaiserslautern, Germany, building a fall-back command center there with Lockheed Martin. Others included U.S. Army Southern European Task Force (SETAF) Joint Task Force Headquarters in Italy and Multi-National Corps-Iraq.
Markey cites Aethra’s performance over poor communications links as the major reason for this success. “I can run at 64 Kbps, and 128 Kbps. The military doesn’t have enough bandwidth, so the lower bandwidth that you can run with and still keep good video quality is critical. Our codec can take imagery from high-resolution imagery satellites because our data channel speed is up to 10 times faster than our competitors.”
DoD is making Joint Interoperability Test Command Test Command (JITC) certification for COTS TVC mandatory in 2008 in order to join DoD’s approved product list. Aethra intends to be the first commercial manufacturer to pass this milestone, according to Markey. “I just got back from Fort Huachuca after two weeks of testing. We have gone through the Standard Telecommunications Interoperability Group test, the IP hacker test and others. We will become be the first VTC manufacturer to get through the new standards through the JITC, standards after our final test finish 21st February.”
INFORMATION ASSURANCE
“The major issue with the use of commercially available VTC products by military organizations in the U.S. is the integration of the encryption gear to ensure compliance with accreditation authorities at the individual facilities,” said Barry Goldin, director of systems integration at Audio Video Systems, Inc. (AVS).
There are two primary means of communication for VTC: dial up and IP. The legacy base with DoD is heavily dial-up. In 1997, AVS developed their AVSIM-366 product that simplified the dialing process. Previously, most people had used an IMUX to bond calls, requiring users to have to directly dial calls at the IMUX, which is a complicated task and precluded the use of the codec’s phonebook and simplified dialing capability.
"That was very complicated," explained Goldin. “Integration of from the codec itself other feature where is transferred to the stream is separated out the encryption gear. allows for the call to be established, the data stream encrypted and the dialing be isolated so that maintain the security of the overall system. Previously people didn’t dialing stream because couldn’t isolate it.” AVS also enable switching secure and non-secure use across DoD.
The second generation product was released in 2004 the dial isolation as bypass switching into a single-rack mount chassis. This allowed for RS-232 remote control and relay indication of status and was another large step forward in the ease of use and level of integration.
Goldin believes the challenge going forward is that now, more and more people are using IP-based VTC in a DoD environment. “That is both good and bad,” he explained. “In some cases, they are using a dedicated network, and they will want to connect a VTC to their dedicated secret or top secret network. With this configuration you have to ensure isolation is supported so that information in one network doesn’t transfer to another. We have been working with clients on this requirement and have fielded approximately 50 systems that address the problem where we allow connectivity to their classified network, as well as access to secure and non-secure dial up solutions, all from a touch panel display.
AVS is investigating a next generation product that will extend the ease of use and integration by allowing people to switch between multiple IP networks across unclassified, secret and top secret. Right now, solutions switch between IP and a dial up capability. “The customer might want all three levels of IP connected, which clearly you can’t do without a lot of isolation,” explained Goldin.
“When we are integrating a total solution, there are a lot of things that come into play. In a command center, a conference room or even a smaller environment, if I am connecting an unclassified VTC, my control system cannot allow information from a secret PC in the corner to be displayed,” explained Goldin. “There is a level of source restriction and user control in our solution which brings the entire system to the level of security that the call is being made at. This ensures you don’t send a graphic from a PC that is showing classified information. Different isolation techniques are used to guarantee to the accrediting authority that no release of classified information will occur and if you are making a secret call, you isolate the top secret. You always have to err on the side of caution.”
ISSUES AND SOLUTIONS
Erik Werner, senior technologist at Tandberg Federal, identified three major impediments to battlefield real-time video networks that all manufacturers must address, “The first is the network itself, bandwidth variances and topology—SAT, RF, terrestrial, etc. The second is communicating across domains and theaters while the last being once you have setup the pathways, how do you find someone on the network.” The company ends up solving these problems for users across DoD, “Every major combatant command uses our technology as well as the Intel community and similar communities of interest. Almost every agency in the U.S. federal government uses Tandberg technology in one form or another.”
Ensuring connectivity when the network may be suffering hits isn’t being addressed by a single quick-fix but via the implementation of a variety of automatic standards-based elements, including intelligent packet loss recovery (IPLR), downspeeding and automatic algorithm negotiation.
“From the warfighter’s perspective, the mission continues because the communications do,” said Werner, “The ability to communicate across theaters and domains were done with the help of Tandberg firewall traversal technology found in the Tandberg Border Controller and Tandberg Gatekeeper. Both use standards-based H.460.18 and H.460.19 to perform this task as well as other methods. This successfully allows the warfighter to seamlessly connect with other members regardless of where they reside on the battlefield network. The last part of finding people was done with the help of Tandberg FindMe technology in conjunction with our ability to distribute phonebooks to the video endpoints. FindMe allows the network to place multiple calls to multiple places in order to find the corresponding person. Phonebooks are just that; a published white pages making it easier to locate an individual.”
Werner identified the “unified communications space” as the “area where we see the most amount of interest, both generated from the user community and industry alike. What you will continue to see out of Tandberg are products that stress our three main philosophies. These are reliability, ease of use and scalability. All three pillars help drive the development of products and software that come together and provide one main focus for our customers; and that is to meet their mission-critical communication needs.”
“The key aspect of the SeaTac VTC Communicator family, is that it is enclosed in very small briefcase structure. You open the briefcase and you have your LCD screen on the top part of the briefcase and all the guts of the VTC system in the bottom. The rear has all the ports that you plug into,” explained Eric Thompson, president and CEO of Seavio LLC . The design originated from a requirement initiated by the U.S. military, Thompson continued, “We built a series of this product and delivered it to them and that was the launch of the product. “The system is built around the Tandberg 880 VTC platform which is then integrated by Seavio with modifications to electronic sub systems to aid deployability in the field such as battery back up and a redesign of the camera to operate in the small enclosure.
“The biggest contributor in terms of new technology relates to two elements. One of them is form factor—size and weight. We continue to push the envelope in terms of the actual form factor and size of the deployable component that is going out in the field. The other is power and electronics; we have an efficient and highly developed power platform to accept multiple power inputs in terms of autosensing. You can plug in anything to the platform and the system will sense the power you are plugging into and allow you to run off the power, whether it be 10-30V DC or 100-240V AC, and continue to operate in the fielded environment.” ♦