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GCN Home > 11/22/04 issue

Needed: self-configuring networks

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Army Col. Timothy Gibson is no stranger to strange ideas. His early career, for instance, included riding not tanks or Humvees, but dune buggies.

It was good training for his present role as a program manager in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Advanced Technology Office.

Earlier this year, he and other DARPA officials sparked debate by saying the protocols now used on the Internet and other public networks were not adequately serve the military’s future network-centric warfare needs.

Before his DARPA assignment, Gibson had long, rich experience in Defense IT. He was director of technology for the Joint Task Force for Computer Network Operations. He managed deployment of the Army’s intratheater data network during the first Gulf War. He also was technical director for the commander in chief of U.S. forces in South Korea, and chief of network security and information assurance for the Pacific Command in Honolulu.

Gibson taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., where he was commissioned in 1979. He has master’s degrees in computer science and history from the University of Kansas and a doctorate in computer science from the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

GCN associate editor Joab Jackson spoke with Gibson at DARPA headquarters in Arlington, Va.

GCN: What’s the most urgent military need in networking?

GIBSON: We need secure and reliable systems that can scale to large sizes on their own, particularly in the wireless area.

More than 10 percent of the forces we’ve deployed for Operation Iraqi Freedom were for network and communications support. We’d like to get that down to 1 percent or 2 percent, but today’s network equipment requires large numbers of troops to make sure it is working correctly.

The computing devices we have, particularly the routers, were designed so that once you install them someplace and get them running, you leave them there.

If you decide to move something, you have to reconfigure it. That doesn’t meet the military model very well. It’d be much better if a device could configure itself.

More news on related topics: Defense IT, IT Infrastructure