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Space-routed internet moves to the mainstream
Amazon might be most known for how it has mastered the logistics of moving millions of items on the ground. But it’s also active in space, in a race to build out the next generation of enterprise communications capabilities.
Amazon Leo, formerly known as Project Kuiper, has already put some 150 satellites into low earth orbit (LEO), according to its principal business development lead, Rich Pang. Leo’s goal, Pang said, is to “enable connecting folks who don’t have connectivity or who have poor connectivity.”
Operating at a height of about 600 kilometers, the satellites’ RF links “are easily done with small terminals and, because of that closeness to earth, [with] high throughput and low latency,” he said.
That includes enterprises, including the Defense Department and federal national security agencies.
“We know that the defense and national security apparatus is not a fixed force, it’s a mobile force,” Pang said. “It requires multi domain connectivity to ensure that airplanes, ships, trucks, command vehicles are always connected, not only in receiving information, but getting commands out to the field as well.”
He said Leo augments communications capabilities the military and national security components already have with “more resilient and secure connectivity to ensure they have that ability to connect all those operations regardless of which domain they operate in.”
Remote regions of the oceans where the Navy operates come to mind, but land areas also have connectivity gaps, or ground-based comms get knocked out.
“You can’t have guaranteed fiber connectivity or usual connectivity that you’re used to having back at home station,” Pang said. “It’s important to have very flexible types of comms that can respond rapidly to wherever they need to deploy forces.”
“I often think about our first responders, or disaster response customers that have multiple systems at any given time to ensure they have connectivity,” he added.
They already have their radios, microwave and cellular connections. Now, Pang said, “in the event any of those are taken down, they have to have satellite as a backup.”
Resilient, redundant
The addition of LEO satellites, with their low latency relative to geosynchronous satellites, contribute to what Pang called next generation connectivity. It’s marked by resiliency because of the alternate pathways for data movement the satellites bring.
Optical links among the satellites themselves contribute to the resiliency, Pang said. Inter-satellite pathways “remove congestion from certain ground points [and] allow us to have multiple paths to move information … not only on the ground but in space as well.”
Rather than operate as a separate entity, the satellite comms integrate with terrestrial capabilities and, for that matter, to commercial computing clouds, Pang said.
To ensure compliance with customers’ security requirements, Pang said, Leo operates within “this private connectivity directly into the cloud services … for our customers who are seeking secure solutions.” He noted that some industries have security needs at least as rigorous as the FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) requirement of the government.
As a managed service, Pang said, Leo constantly optimizes itself to maintain maximum use of its available bandwidth.
“It’s got varying geometries. It’s got varying frequencies,” he said. “And so inherently, these types of capabilities also make it more secure in that it helps reduce interference, whether meaningful or unintended.”
Beyond that, the Leo satellites fit in with a general trend of internet protocol (IP) as the basis for all communications, whether voice or data. That is, the multiprotocol label switching gives way to IP and software-defined wide area networks.
“I think this opens up the aperture to incorporate a lot of different capabilities throughout the many domains [the DoD] operates and also shorten the timeline in which they get that information from sensors to processing centers to engagement vehicles,” Pang said.
Grand orchestration
Therein lies the importance of redundancy and resiliency, especially in austere or contested environments. Pang described those qualities as “not being locked into a single architecture, but rather having many choices, having alternative to getting your information where it needs to go.”
“Resiliency, in my mind, is creating a dynamic system that allows you to choose the best path to take when you’re moving information around,” he added.
Pang said the government has been working continuously on how to integrate disparate networks and applications at the terminal level, where they operate single apertures that work on multiple networks.” This requires “an orchestration of all those capabilities to build that resiliency into the broader architecture that the Defense Department is trying to deploy now.”
Signal interruption, for instance by weather or intentionally interfered with by adversaries, occur regularly in Defense and national security situations.
“The system is designed to always sense for interference, whether it’s intentional or not,” Pang said. “It’s sensing for weather interference. It’s sensing for intentional interference, so it always knows that it needs an alternate path.”
Sensing and rerouting happen automatically, he said. The system “always knows that if I have interference in a particular path, it knows to look for the alternative or the tertiary path. The system is designed to constantly be optimizing itself very rapidly to ensure that that interference is dealt with.”
Pang said the LEO satellites of Amazon strengthen an important link in the information-to-decision chain. Once data from various sources arrived where it’s needed, “there are a lot of fusion engines, whether they sit on premises, in the cloud or even at the tactical edge.”
Leo is concerned with the movement of the data to those fusion sites.
“Our play is getting information to where it needs to be, whether it’s at the tactical edge or back to a data center to be fused, processed and then redistributed,” Pang said. “As the transport layer, not only can we get all that information back, we can help redistribute that information very quickly to the tactical user, so that commanders can make decisions in a much shortened timeline.”
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