Making Better Use of Bandwidth

Recent operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated the Army’s increasing reliance on communications, making it important to find ways in which the Army might better use bandwidth. This report discusses how existing data compression and network management techniques could be used in the near to medium term to improve performance. These techniques will not solve the bandwidth bottleneck but will contribute to better performance with minimal impact on existing networks. The authors describe how several modern compression technologies work, along with some of the tradeoffs involved in using them. In addition, network accelerators can improve throughput by changing network structure and operations at the last link to the user. These technologies enable users to manage their individual bandwidth needs and, when combined with new compression technologies, could potentially reduce bandwidth demands by an order of magnitude. The authors recommend that the Army incorporate compression and network acceleration technologies into future systems, identify where Army-specific tailoring could improve on commercial data compression technologies, and develop an experimental plan to determine acceptable compression-related losses in quality and to train users.