Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Navy set to navigate with wireless LANs

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 11:56:46 -0500

Navy set to navigate with wireless LANs
By John Cox
Network World

01/27/03

Wireless LANs (http://www.nwfusion.com/topics/wirelesslans.html)
are being installed on Navy warships to free up manpower, reduce
crew sizes and improve monitoring of a range of mechanical and
electrical systems.

The installation effort, dubbed Total Ship Monitoring (TSM), lets
Navy crew members check and control systems from computers
anywhere onboard. It's an extension of the Smartship refitting and
redesign program the Navy launched in 1996 to let captains command
their ships from anywhere onboard.

The USS Howard, a guided-missile destroyer commissioned in 2001
and assigned to the Navy's 3rd Fleet, based in San Diego, is being
outfitted with specialized wireless gateways based on the IEEE
802.11b (http://www.nwfusion.com/links/Encyclopedia/0-9/595.html)
wireless LAN standard. The gateways, which defense contractor 3E
Technologies International (3ETI) designed and built, use a radio
link to interconnect sensors on gear such as pumps and motors with
back-end data processing applications.

So instead of laying hundreds of feet of cabling by cutting
through a steel ship and adding weight to the vessel, the radio
link makes possible much faster and less-disruptive deployment of
the sensors.

A series of mockups and simulations have proven the TSM system
works on land. But the critical phase is proving the TSM will work
under the demands of combat and life at sea.

"[The Navy is] moving from an industrial-based, manpower-intensive
work force, to a new realm of information technology," says David
Bartlett, the Navy's Smartship science and technology manager.
"There's a lot we can do with IT for automation." TSM is being
incorporated into new combat ships being launched and into
existing ships.

TSM uses 802.11b wireless LANs, sensing devices attached to things
such as motors and pipes, and programmable logic controllers,
which are special computers that have long been used to control a
range of civilian factory machinery, such as cardboard bailers,
heating/air conditioning equipment and conveyor lines. "It's been
difficult to tie all these pieces together in an integrated
fashion," Bartlett says.

Wireless is now a key element in TSM projects. Data from scores or
hundreds of sensors can be fed back to access points and servers
without the cost, weight and delay of wiring or rewiring steel
ships.

The wireless LANs will change the way crew members perform their
jobs. "Today, they have to do rounds, every 45 minutes or two
hours, for example," says Benga Erinle, director of government
operations for 3ETI. "They're checking equipment, machinery and
filling out and signing paper logs."

The TSM system is intended to do all this automatically.

"It goes beyond simply gathering information," Erinle says. "We
also use programs for diagnostics and prognostics, based on the
data. If a critical system is going to fail, we'll pick that up
and alert the chief engineer that this is pending."

The TSM system also will change the Navy's longstanding practice
of time-based maintenance - of replacing or tearing down machinery
after so many hours or days of use.

That is very labor-intensive and not very cost-effective,"
Bartlett says. TSM will funnel megabytes of real-time data into
sophisticated algorithms that can predict accurately when repair
work needs to be done. In the past, the Navy hardwired analog
sensors into programmable logic controllers and wired these into a
computer system called the Integrated Condition Assessment System
(ICAS). 3ETI designed an eight-channel analog-to-digital
converter, called the 3E 555I gateway, that acquires the data and
optimizes the 802.11b radio connection to a remote wireless access
point, which links via a wired LAN to ICAS.

The contractor also wrote several software programs. Session
Manager is a middleware application, based on the Java Messaging
System, that lets an array of different shipboard applications
share data. The Prognostics Framework is a lightweight application
that runs on the 555I: The software detects changes that meet
certain criteria, such as temperature exceeding a given level for
a specified time. Then, the software sends an alert to a crew
member watching an ICAS terminal.

The radio links are encrypted with either Triple-DES (
http://www.nwfusion.com/links/Encyclopedia/D/596.html) or the
newer Advanced Encryption Standard
(http://www.nwfusion.com/links/Encyclopedia/A/597.html, both
stipulated by the Navy to encrypt data.

"The Navy wants to go from 300-man destroyers to 90-man
destroyers," Erinle says. "The only way to do that is to take
processes that are highly manual and automate them."

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