Communications technologies have proliferated in many different directions, leading to a plethora of useful tools, but no guarantee that any two (or more) will work well together.
The military may feel the pain of this lack of interoperability especially keenly, since its missions can be matters of life or death.
Communities of users, such as the Army’s Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, buy the hardware and software products that best fit their own architectures, said Walton Brown, product director, satellite terminal systems, Army Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems.
“It becomes cumbersome, as each community develops more communications requirements, as they adopt more commercial hardware into their architecture to take advantage of the latest protocols. You end up having to keep on layering additional equipment.”
The solutions to this longstanding problem are not at all clear, but some emerging approaches such as adherence to published standards and interfaces are helping.
