Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/139409
C C4ISR "The long-term goal is to roll out a permanent capability that can be turned on at a moment's notice to support any short-notice exercise or operation – it's a stand-up capability and it always works." wings serviced by the new ISR architecture. With each subsequent exercise, the RCAF added more multicast nodes. By the end of this year, it is expected that most wings will be fully connected to the ISR architecture allowing their operational command centres and intelligence staff to access airborne imagery in real time. "The long-term goal is to roll out a permanent capability that can be turned on at a moment's notice to support any shortnotice exercise or operation – it's a stand-up capability and it always works," Dunfield explained. "It's a complex configuration and right now if you shut it down, to get it back up and all the bugs work out can take weeks or months – to stand it up for Op Nanook took over four months." Common highway The key to building the information highway are new radio ground stations to receive and "condition" fixed and streaming imagery for the network, much of it from infrared, electro-optical cameras, as well as from radar systems. While the RCAF inventory of ground stations does include some short and long-range receivers, the TIC3 Air project will acquire mostly long range receivers and provide system level support for these. Most of the receivers use the NATO line-of-sight communications standard for ISR, Tactical Common Data Link. TCDL is a radio frequency (RF) link that passes network data on standard Internet Protocol (IP). Variants of TCDL transmitters with omni-directional and directional antennas already exist on the Aurora patrol aircraft as well as the Griffon and Sea King helicopters. "One of the advantages as we roll out this capability is that we can expand it very easily because it is based on IP networks," Dunfield explained. "The radio frequency link allows IP traffic to go to and from an aircraft. Any aircraft with a TCDL link can connect any network on the ground to a network in the aircraft." Interoperability between services and allied forces is always an issue. For this reason, DND's ISR community agreed a number of years ago to use only NATO standards for ISR data storage and distribution. As a result the army, navy and air force can acquire ISR air-, land- or sea-based sensor platforms and deployable surface receiver stations that best suit their needs and still interoperate. "The army tends to be the lead on the standards and interoperability testing, which is fabulous," Dunfield said. "They invest a lot of expertise and effort into it which provides a high level of assurance – we're all connected with the same standards." At the heart of the federated network is the Coalition Shared Database, a collection of both fixed and portable databases into which ISR imagery metadata is fed and stored. To "talk to and 18 JUNE/JULY 2013 www.vanguardcanada.com interrogate the CSD network, the RCAF is adopting a lightweight tool developed by the army known as Sensor Command and Control Planning Suite (SC2PS)," Dunfield said. "If a user performs a search looking for all imagery of some area that was collected over the last two hours, they will get a response similar to that of a Google search: a list with links and thumbnails. It is a smart implementation of an application that is bandwidth efficient." The powerful search tools allow users to view real-time aircraft locations as well as the terrain covered by an aircraft's sensors. With a recent upgrade of the RIFL2E aircraft, a user located at a CSNI terminal can remotely steer the onboard camera to look at a point of interest. "Rolling out this architecture will change the concept of operations," Dunfield said. "It's a completely new paradigm of doing the work that we do. I'm not sure that everyone in the intelligence community understands the significance of it yet. Normally, if they are tasked to support a mission, they have to pack up and go into the field to conduct operations. With this technology, they can stay at home – the data is fed to them and is fully flexible. With a full implementation of the architecture as demonstrated by the RIFL2E aircraft, you no longer have to stream that high bandwidth video; as the data comes into the aircraft, you record it at the highest quality and store it on the server. You have the option of distributing lower bandwidth video and if someone needs high bandwidth, they just pull the recorded video file. The Griffon records on four streams at about 20 megabits per second – you can't pass it over any military network. You now have the ability to receive higher quality video than ever before at your desk. With JUSTAS (a project to acquire a medium altitude long endurance UAV capability for the air force) or other deployed systems in the future, the assets will fly over a designated area and we can do all the operations for situational awareness and intelligence analysis while located back in Canada." full picture As the array of sensors continues to grow on aircraft – next-generation aircraft promise to deliver even more capability – the demand to move and process the data they generate has never been greater. Until now, however, despite spending millions on aircraft systems, the RCAF has not fully captured the value of its ISR data. Through TIC3 Air, the RCAF will pave a new highway, connecting its airborne systems to new ground systems, and deliver its data in a way that few NATO allies other than the United States can match.