C3I&N expands network lanes
Most Air Force installations, each hosting thousands of users, connect to the outside world through a choke point that resembles single-lane vehicle entry control points on a military base, called a boundary. The Command, Control, Communications, Intelligence and Networks Program Executive Office at Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass., succeeded in replacing legacy, single-lane connections measured in hundreds of megabytes with multiple-gigabyte, highway-sized connections. In addition to providing a tenfold traffic increase, the systems are also redundant, which achieves “dual path resiliency” for those bases and reduces data packet loss. (U.S. Air Force graphic by Lance Beebe)