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ROY KEELER, DIR. OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
ATCA: Attractive To Combat Applications?
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hardware, and make it much more appealing to the military. First of all, ATCA is truly an open, modular platform. This is crucial to the whole idea of "commercial off-the-shelf" (COTS) procurement. The goal of COTS procurement is to avoid single-source proprietary solutions in favor of open, competitive platforms such as ATCA. COTS solutions also offer the sort of long-term roadmaps and migration paths that military applications depend on.
So, why use ATCA over competing COTS technologies? The answer is simple; ATCA offers several key advantages over commercial or enterprise platforms as ATCA was originally designed for the telecom industry where RASM (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability, Manageability) is a requirement. As such, ATCA offers a minimum of 99.999% uptime, together with availability, redundancy, field serviceability and robust platform management capabilities. In addition, the move to 10Gb Ethernet in the backplane is driving ATCA platforms to be the compelling choice for network element platforms. This is a big deal in the military network, where life and safety may be at issue if the network fails.
Currently, DoD planners are stretching the lifecycles of military platforms 25, 50 and in the case of B-52s to an astounding 75 years! This means that when the deployment of new technologies is considered, reliability, support and total life cycle cost are major factors in the selection process. ATCA has a lot going for it when compared to competing technologies like rackmount servers, blade servers and the like as it is an open modular system that is fully interoperable with any other PICMG 3.X compliant system. The modular open architecture, interoperable ecosystem, use of COTS components, packet processing capabilities and built in reliability for telecom applications can make ATCA the natural choice for military communications infrastructure applications.
In the future, these platforms could include providing cell service, cloud computing, voice recognition, networked ops and even unmanned systems control by the soldiers at the forward edge of the battlefield. ATCA could be the enabling technology behind these capabilities.
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The demand for real-time information on the battlefield has never been greater with the deployment of ISR assets at the forward edge of the battlefield as the engine driving this demand. Electronic warfare, particularly C4ISR, is gaining favor over
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big-ticket weapons systems. The 2010 Army modernization strategy refers to the individual soldier as the “center of gravity” and has a stated goal to integrate soldiers into a common network. The strategy calls for “integrated networked soldiers” in all combat brigade teams by 2025. As such, the Department of Defense pursuit of field deployable advanced networking is taking on new meaning with the introduction of modern communications systems such as WIN-T, Distributed Common Ground Station and Nett Warrior. In the air, programs such as Gorgon Stare, P-8, and LEMV will produce petabytes of data that must be distributed to commanders at headquarters and the warfighter on the ground. All of these platforms could derive benefits from the use of telecom grade enterprise systems using an architecture such as AdvancedTCA (ATCA).
Most military applications require rugged deployable hardware that fits into a specific size weight and power (SWAP) profile. Certainly one would not be able to place an ATCA system into a tank or torpedo. For those systems the venerable form factors of VME and cPCI fit the bill, with VPX soon to follow. However, for those platforms with sheltered, benign environments, such as naval vessels, wide body aircraft, and fixed ground radar stations, ATCA can be an excellent choice.
ATCA - or 'Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture' - refers to a family of computing and communications specifications that hold tremendous promise for the DoD. ATCA has some features that completely set it apart from the enterprise class of
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