General Dynamics United Kingdom Limited and Bubblephone Ltd. have demo’d to senior MoD officials the C-THRU network optimization software running on the Bowman military communications network. The C-THRU software plug-in overcomes many of the operational obstacles and technical issues encountered with modern tactical communications networks.
Dropped into a network, C-THRU establishes network connections and maintains them, irrespective of changes in the network environment. It does this by constantly being aware of the network environment and intelligently ‘adapting’ itself to keep open the best connection. For example, if a wireless connection is lost due to mountainous terrain, C-THRU will seamlessly failover to a different network type or connection method. It also prioritizes traffic so that urgent communications always get through.
C-THRU also enables traffic to be prioritized over different network types according to pre-set rules; for example saving on costly satellite links for non-priority traffic. Also, by being network-, protocol-, and operating system-agnostic, C-THRU can connect different networks, even those not designed to be compatible. This means military personnel from different coalition forces, using different networks that were once incompatible, can now communicate with each other. The demo on ‘green kit’ was undertaken at the EDGE™ U.K. demonstration suite at General Dynamics U.K.’s facility in South Wales. Three weeks earlier, Bubblephone demo’d to MoD officials the first integration of C-THRU running on a test network as part of the final phase of a MoD Centre for Defence Enterprise (CDE) project. Following the CDE demonstration, Bubblephone’s engineers integrated C-THRU rapidly into a subset of the Bowman communications system, to prove that the plug-in technology works seamlessly.
