On behalf of the Royal Navy, QinetiQ selected Riverbed to overcome some of the critical limitations of using a mix of satellite, UHF (both wide and narrow band) and HF bearers for operational data communications. Performance over these links can be dramatically poorer than the slowest civil dial-up connection.

Although its underlying network for data transmission functions for SATCOM-fitted ships, the Royal Navy was looking for ways to allow its existing command support systems to operate seamlessly with all its ships around the world, using any potential network bearer. This means that it must optimise end-to-end performance to make best possible use of whatever bandwidth is available.

Ideally, the Royal Navy wanted to enhance user experience, when using poor quality tactical bearers, to the levels it was able to achieve using its wider bandwidth SATCOM systems. They had been testing other application performance enhancing products, but these other contenders invariably required frequent user intervention, which the Royal Navy wanted to avoid.

In total, QinetiQ evaluated products from five application acceleration, wide area file services (WAFS) and WAN optimization products, and found that Riverbed's Steelhead appliance provided the highest baseline performance for TCP optimization and bandwidth utilization, while at the same time delivering unparalleled ease of installation and use across the complete range of communications links.

QinetiQ has extensively tested the Steelhead appliance using the new Maritime Tactical Networking Command and Control (MTNC2) system under the most demanding of network conditions.

As well as optimizing all TCP traffic, the Riverbed appliances optimize the performance of a range of applications including Microsoft Office, Exchange 5.5, Oracle, Apache Webserver and specialist tactical picture applications such ICS/C2PC, which are used to communicate and display the location of ships and aircraft across the globe.

"In the three and a half week sea trial period in a recent operational deployment, QinetiQ achieved at least a 3.5 times average performance improvement across all Royal Navy Command Support System (RNCSS) applications in seven ships using the new MTNC2 tactical network," said Sion Evans, a senior network and systems consultant for QinetiQ.

"With the C2PC applications, the improvements were up to 44 times. In addition to these advantages, Steelhead can actually make transmission data more secure, since only small references to previous data are being sent."

This project was undertaken as part of the UK MoD's Applied Research Program (ARP) and the work will also inform a large number of related network-enabling projects such as the Defence Information Infrastructure (DII).

Under the DII initiative, numerous individual information systems throughout the MoD are being replaced with a single more efficient information infrastructure. DII will be a component of the UK's network-enabled capability (NEC) -- the ability to transform the capability of the armed forces through a single network of information, announced in the UK's Strategic Defence Review New Chapter.

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