On-board naval telecommunications

Telecommunications is a fast-growing and constantly evolving technical sector (advent of ATM, deployment of IPV6, UMTS, wireless local area networks...) and constantly promises new and unsuspected possibilities, whether in the civilian or military sphere. The need to acquire, process and organize information in order to improve the performance of combat ships has led to an ever-increasing number of IT applications being installed on French Navy vessels. These applications exchange ever-increasing flows of information, with very specific characteristics in terms of throughput, time constraints (isochronism) and confidentiality. In addition to the constraints linked to the heterogeneity of the — flows, which are the same as in the civilian world and pose many problems on the Internet —, the networks that carry them are also subject to constraints linked to the need to withstand "Navy" environmental conditions.

On-board telecommunications are part of the "naval system", a vast ensemble including weapons, hull, crew... whose coherence and synchronized actions enable a warship to carry out its missions. Interconnected with the other components of military telecommunications via HF transmissions, satellite (SYRACUSE II) and infrastructure networks on land, internal telecommunications are evolving by federating around a single network or by aggregating with the networks of other ships in the same fleet. This concept will soon make it possible, thanks to the total and instantaneous sharing of information, to trigger, for example, the weapon system of a first ship against an enemy detected by the radar of a second ship in the same combat fleet. Since on-board telecommunications have a relatively long life cycle compared with the civilian world (10 to 20 years for wired and antenna infrastructures), it is essential to opt for the most innovative concepts at the design stage.

The article presents the internal on-board component of naval telecommunications (networks and information and command systems), the other components (ship-to-shore links) having been dealt with elsewhere in military telecommunications (article ).

This article examines the particularities of a large, secure, on-board internal telecommunications system, and the solutions used to meet the requirements. Three examples illustrate the problem of integrating applications on a backbone network, and the use of specific techniques when purely civilian solutions (or Commercial Off-The-Shelf) are not satisfactory.

This is followed by an exhaustive description of the IT applications on board the largest units, as well as the various inter-application data flows that justify the implementation of a high-performance on-board network.

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