Military Networks Require Multi-Orbit SATCOM with Intelligent Network Management

During the last few years, U.S. military decision makers have realized that their unique, siloed communications networks will not provide the resilience needed for mission success in today’s contested battlespace. The Department of Defense (DoD) is shifting strategies to change this circumstance and leverage a hybrid mix of communications technologies, including both commercial and military solutions, that can talk to each other to ensure no single point of failure in their communications architecture. Creating this redundancy is very valuable, but redundancy does not solve the problem entirely. Military networks cannot ensure real-time communications. Commercial satellite communications providers have worked with the DoD to create a way to automate all the communications across the military enterprise to guarantee connectivity. Industry knows intelligent, software-defined networks will deliver access to these paths without disruption so no one user is disconnected. The Hughes Defense team has worked with the DoD to develop and demonstrate network orchestration that can serve to keep information moving at mission speed.

DoD is transforming SATCOM for greater resiliency

The DoD has been working together with commercial providers to create a resilient, flexible SATCOM architecture. This effort started in 2017 when the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) launched the COMSATCOM Pilot Program, where several commercial providers helped assess the ideal hybrid SATCOM architecture and how diverse systems could work together to enable more flexible and resilient military satellite communications. In 2022, the DoD CIO Office issued the Enterprise SATCOM Management and Control Implementation Plan to provide guidelines for Enterprise Management & Control (EMC) to help with resiliency and interoperability objectives across commercial and DoD satellite communication systems. This plan also helped establish foundational capabilities necessary for the ongoing future SATCOM Force Design, including increased reliance on commercial SATCOM. While this collaboration was taking place, General John W. Raymond issued the “Fighting SATCOM” strategy, stating that this architecture needs to deliver enterprise SATCOM capabilities to the Commander of the United States Space Command in order to support joint warfighters across the full spectrum of conflict at the speed of relevance and in contested, degraded, and operationally limited environments.

Hybrid SATCOM and wireless architecture, including intelligent networking, ensures flexible, real-time communications

A hybrid and resilient SATCOM architecture will provide users with access to a mix of communications technologies, including both commercial and military solutions, from SATCOM to terrestrial 5G wireless technology. These capabilities will expand the amount of capacity available across the globe, as well as in specific regions, using the global reach of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites and the extremely high capacity available from state-of-the-art geostationary (GEO) satellites, including the JUPITER 3 satellite. These transport paths can enhance military readiness, but how does a user gain access to these resources in real time?

Today’s terrestrial wireless communications represent a good example of an architecture that depends on a mix of services, like the hybrid transports that the DoD is starting to offer its users. The difference is wireless users know that they are not locked into one service provider that cannot provide any reliable backup. Current wireless services are interoperable, enabling users to access many open standards technologies and providers, giving users more choice in services and levels of service. Users expect that they will be able to use their devices even if a network has an outage. Wireless providers will access another tower or system to ensure seamless, real-time communications.

Military users are seeing how flexible network orchestration works to support their applications

Hughes is working with various military users to demonstrate how software-defined network management and orchestration can ensure resiliency and uninterrupted communications using hybrid networks, even if there is interference or an outage on their network.

• Defense Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet (DEUCSI), managed by the U.S. Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), is exploring how to augment military communications by leveraging the growing commercial satellite internet industry.  Hughes is supporting AFRL in developing a flexible SATCOM network which can integrate government, military and commercial satellite constellations and bandwidth for encrypted and non-encrypted communications and data sharing. Using many bands and technologies, users will gain access to critical data in real time, even in disrupted, disconnected, intermittent and low-bandwidth circumstances. This AFRL project will take primary, alternate, contingency, emergency (PACE) communications planning to another level supporting ground- and air-based missions.
• The EchoStar team, led by Hughes, demonstrated software-defined network capabilities at the U.S. Navy’s Whidbey Island Air Station (NASWI) and in Hawaii. This demonstration showed the U.S. Navy how our highly flexible and resilient mission planning capabilities automatically switch communications paths to ensure uninterrupted access to situational awareness information. The powerful Network Management System (NMS) and Smart Network Edge (SNE) technologies dynamically planned and provided common operating pictures for situational awareness that supported Automated Primary Alternate Contingency Emergency (APACE) planning. This software-defined capability changed the communications path, Quality of Service (QoS), and various time/space-based resource commitments to speed up changes and access to the network’s SATCOM resources. Essentially offering a communications path that is always “on the net.”

Agile, software-defined networking for SATCOM and other wireless technologies like 5G will integrate, synchronize, and orchestrate these hybrid communications networks so they can anticipate and realign assets in near real time. The Hughes Defense team looks forward to discussing how this automation can be applied to specific missions to optimize the flexibility and control that warfighters and commanders require.