MilCIS 2023 - Session 2.6a Expo Product Brief: Battlespace Communications System, Network Innovation Advancing the Joint Black Core Network (JBCN) Concept to Deliver End-to-end Services for the Integrated Force

Session 2.6a Expo Product Brief: Battlespace Communications System, Network Innovation Advancing the Joint Black Core Network (JBCN) Concept to Deliver End-to-end Services for the Integrated Force

Tracks

‎ Open Session

Wednesday, November 15, 2023

1:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Royal Theatre

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ADF operations are evolving. The ADF, like other modern militaries, are faced with many challenges in operating the network within a distributed, disrupted and austere environment. The challenges include the flexibility and agility required to support military operations, access to limited bandwidth, external influences competing for dominance in the cyber and electromagnetic environments across all tactical domains.
Having recognised the need for the ADF to converge on a Joint Black Core Network, attention now turns to the changing nature of deployed operations. Operations with a proliferation of many more deployed computing nodes, including autonomous platforms, that require reliable and resilient network connectivity to perform their mission.
A ten times growth in the number of nodes is anticipated. The mission set for deployed broadband networks is expanding, with a greater focus on sensor, decider, effector concepts. Collaboration on the battlefield is increasing, challenging network protocols. At these new scales of interconnected mesh connectivity, enterprise technologies fail. Their constrained centralised architectures do not translate to a large-scale deployed mesh of peer-to-peer cooperating nodes.
Innovation targeting the military problem is required to provide operators with simplicity at scale. Operators need to manage a much larger network with a resilient meshed topology and multiple battlefield priorities.
At MilCIS 2022 Boeing presented an outline of the JBCN and an update on the network technology. This brief extends on this to forecast the future operating concepts that demand even higher performance from networks.

Speaker/s

Mr Andrew Brownlee

System Architect

Boeing Defence Australia

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Andrew Brownlee is the System Architect for the Project Currawong Battlespace Communications System, responsible for collaborating with the Commonwealth acquisition team, Australian Defence Force end-users and engineers across multiple disciplines to establish a genuinely deployable and agile architecture for a broadband communications system. The Currawong team have maintained a culture of innovation that has delivered three major system releases. Andrew worked in many engineering and leadership capacities for Boeing over the last 25 years. His career in engineering began in a systems integration role on the Collins Class Submarine project in 1995 and has progressed through the many facets of systems engineering for complex systems. For the ADF’s High Frequency Modernisation Project, Andrew led the development of a system performance model, in collaboration with stakeholders, including the Defence Science and Technology Organisation. Andrew is a graduate from the University of New South Wales with a combined Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical) and Bachelor of Science (Computing) degree. Andrew has maintained a passion for systems engineering and a constant desire to understand the complexity behind systems development. Outside of work, Andrew is committed to his wife and two sons. He embraces family travel opportunities and is enjoying a new hobby in woodworking.