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2024-01-10

OPAL Elevates Airborne Connectivity Terrain

Few spectacles rival the breath-taking display of fighter jets manoeuvring in perfect unison at mind-bending speeds in excess of 1,000 miles per hour.

But beyond the spectacle lies a critical reality: in combat scenarios, split-second decisions amid unpredictable enemy behaviour are the norm.

Ensuring secure and seamless communication among warfighter teams becomes paramount. Enter the concept of a Common Operating Picture (COP).

After a dependable COP is set up, teams can communicate covertly, track troops, adapt to threats, prevent mid-air collisions, and ensure mission success.

Surprisingly, the primary challenge isn’t the communication method or radio spectrum, but frequently the aircraft platform. Why?

It’s because traditional air platforms are very large and composed of four different layers, with unique avionics blocks for each different aircraft type.

The first layer is hardware and drivers, while the second layer is typically commercial interfaces. The third is the service layer and the fourth is the application layer. Each of these layers tends to be highly proprietary with exclusive symbology and dictionary for diverse aircraft types.

Another inherent challenge arises when customers seek to add their own software or customise aspects; their only recourse is often returning to the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) who designed the platform for a potential workaround.

Interoperability Imperative

In network-centric warfare (NCW), the challenge lies in the absence of a unified development environment, hindering seamless communication across layers.

Without the right technology, crucial data can stall in operational silos, inaccessible to Command-and-Control (C2) operators. Overcoming this hurdle and introducing real-time interoperability is crucial for optimal results from new avionics applications on air platforms.

Historically, integrating these crucial applications could take five to eight years, costing hundreds of millions.

IAI exactly aimed to counter this by developing the Operational Avionics Layer (OPAL) framework, seeking Real-Time Innovations (RTI) and Connext to transform lengthy implementation cycles into a matter of months.

Network Nexus

OPAL acts as the backbone for networking, data sharing, and operations. Using Connext based on the Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard, it creates a unified data dictionary, allowing all users to contribute and receive operational data across the network.

It revolutionises the addition of applications to air platforms, offering seamless connectivity regardless of aircraft models. OPAL empowers customers for platform customisation without OEM involvement. This independence enables end-users or third-party vendors to develop and integrate software autonomously.

Zooming out to the big picture, OPAL and Connext together succeeded in reducing the process of adding applications to air platforms by a dramatic margin — from roughly 60 months to around five months from an implementation standpoint.

What RTI helped IAI achieve is a turnkey approach that enables customers to introduce new applications faster than was ever possible before in the aviation industry. And the ramifications of that can be huge, in terms of a much shorter time to market and major cost savings for customers.

Best of all, the communication functions are all transparent and universal to customers, who don’t even need to be familiar with DDS to use the OPAL system.

The ability to develop new applications once and then migrate them across multiple platforms is an amazing advantage, which simply did not exist before the creation of OPAL. This opens the door to other net-new capabilities, such as the ability to replace dedicated, pod-based, training systems with OPAL, so that the system that a pilot trains on can be the same as the one used in combat.

In decentralised battle management, OPAL seamlessly integrates with C2 systems, sharing real-time data across air, land, and sea. Its secure framework enables advanced collision avoidance features, displaying evasive manoeuvres directly on pilots’ screens during tight formations.

Aligned with the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) technical standard 3.1, OPAL follows an open avionics approach for military airborne platforms. It leverages Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architecture to evolve compatibly, meeting Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) programme requirements.

It facilitates real-time battlespace visualisation and diverse data exchange, boasting millisecond update intervals crucial for preventing mid-air collisions during intense fighter jet formations. Leveraging software-defined radios and data links, it efficiently shares vast amounts of real-time data.

OPAL Applications

Utilising a self-forming, self-healing Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET), it facilitates real-time data exchange between nodes, allowing platforms originally designed in isolation to share information securely and seamlessly. Robust security measures ensure information accessibility while upholding uncompromised security.

Implementing application-specific Quality of Service (QoS), OPAL ensures prioritised packet delivery, crucial for dynamic airborne networking where platform movements degrade communication links. This feature ensures access to information regardless of the platform’s location or operational situation.

This feature allows the system to deliver the information to the user at any time. Whether the information resides on a slow, high flying UAS, or fast, low flying strike jet, or stored at the air forces’ intelligence hub, all data is accessible in real-time through a decentralised cloud.

Enhanced Connectivity

Digital communications refine airborne data transfer within power and range limits, enabling seamless connectivity between remote and onboard systems. A contemporary human-machine interface translates data into intuitive situational displays, reducing cognitive load and enhancing mission success. For instance, upon network entry, a member’s sensor data aids target visibility for other entities like air defence units.

Integrating data from diverse sensors, the decentralised cloud-based NCW solution analyses and filters information, providing actionable recommendations to minimise user workload.

Such an NCW solution can also provide critical flight safety services for the users in training and operational missions. By watching every platform’s position relative to all others and calculating perilous proximity paths, such capabilities can foresee probable collisions and trigger alerts warning the pilots at risk, with visual and audible instructions for a safe breakaway.

Virtual Munitions

Another capability is operationalised now by a leading air force to implement flight training by introducing virtual munitions on board, enabling the user to practice using munitions without carrying and launching a dummy missile or dropping a training bomb.

Such connected applications also support air Combat Training. Embedded with each user, every participant may create and experience the effects of an opponent’s action in real-time, including long-range threats and opponents beyond the user’s sensor visibility, extending the training up to an entire campaign level using virtual and real entities.

The decentralised NCW solution harnesses adaptive data fusion, achieving new capabilities. Seeking a ‘universal language’ across the network, users across command levels and friendly forces gain a real-time battlespace picture, expanding sensor range by sharing information.

Command elements gain broader situational awareness as the network distributes information, fostering a shared map.

In summary, IAI’s OPAL solution enables air, land and naval forces to establish a highly scalable, robust and real-time distributed networking cloud. OPAL enables manned and unmanned platforms, to share real-time data and generate operational insights for an effective and safer joint mission performance with efficient mission control and management.

The vibrant OPAL system revolutionises networking connectivity, enabling seamless data sharing among all the members of a fighting force, whether airborne, naval, or land-based.

Reference Text/Pic: IAI

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