Critical Technology Gaps and Potential Solutions for Mobile Free Space Optical Networking

Communication traffic for the DoD is expected to experience enormous growth over the next couple of decades due mainly to the deployment of high resolution advanced sensors, rapid growth of communication network users which not only includes humans but also a large number of manned and unmanned sensor and shooter platforms, and the net-centric infrastructure overheads. Recent deployment of fiber-optic backbone under DoD GIG-BE (global information grid-bandwidth extension) program is intended to meet the traffic requirements of static backbone. However, the capacity bottleneck is likely to happen at the tactical communication edge network, primarily supported today by RF communication technologies, limiting the ability to support end-to-end bandwidth-intensive war-fighting applications. In addition to enhancing the communication capacity at the tactical edge, extending high bandwidth connections from diverse end-user geographical locations to the GIG-BE through fixed and mobile optical wireless reach-back networks seems essential for realizing DoD's net-centric vision. Although the fixed, fiber-optic communication technology has matured over the last couple of decades, the mobile free space optical (FSO) technology is still in its infancy. This paper will discuss critical technology, integration, and network architecture gaps as well as the potential approaches for implementing FSO networks in the GIG