An evaluation of ISDN via ACTS in support of Army wide area information services

As the US Army draws down over the remainder of this decade, it will be expected to do more with less. Its ability to successfully project combat power from a CONUS-centric support base will depend greatly on how effectively it can harness the power of advanced information technologies to support its far-flung enterprise. The US Army´s experiences in Southwest Asia demonstrated this. No other war in history relied so heavily on the efficient management of information (voice, data, image, video) in projecting combat power. This paper describes the US Army´s experiment plan for evaluating the effectiveness of two new technologies, Integrated Services Digital Networks (ISDN) and NASA´s Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS), in providing improved information services at lower cost. The first sections give a brief description of the ISDN and ACTS technologies to include their complementary relationships. The following sections describe the ACTS configured for ISDN and the experiments to be conducted by the Army Research Laboratory. Both the technical and operational aspects of the experiment are discussed. The final section of the paper presents past and predicted cost/performance results, comments on anticipated quality of service to be delivered by the ISDN/ACTS system, and comments on the combination of ISDN, ACTS and cellular as enabling technologies for future combat power projection