DISN VIDEO SERVICES FOR FULL MOTION VIDEO

DISN VIDEO SERVICES FOR FULL MOTION VIDEO
Bruce Bennett
Defense Information Systems Agency
Falls Church, VA
ABSTRACT
Full Motion Video from Unmanned and Manned Aerial
Vehicles, ground and stationary sensors has been a
mission critical tool and a force multiplier for OIF and
OEF, providing real-time video for Counter-
Reconnaissance, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Target
Acquisition. The number of sensors in theatre today has
resulted in the development of disparate FMV
distribution architectures to support the dissemination
requirements of specific users and operations. Because
underlying systems and platforms were developed
independently, and for varying missions; backhaul,
collection, storage, and dissemination were neither
synchronized nor standardized. This approach created a
hodge-podge of solutions, each designed to their own
environment, but poorly suited for integration into other
intelligence and command and control architectures.
In response to this problem, DISA is working to establish
an Enterprise FMV Program of Record that will develop
a unified strategy and architecture to resolve the
common sensor reachback and dissemination problem
for full motion video. The DISN Video Service for FMV
will leverage existing Programs of Record, ongoing
demonstrations and prototypes, and defined DoD and
commercial standards to provide a shared service that
integrates with the 2016 Vision for the GIG. The
routing, ingest, processing, archival and dissemination
of the video will be supported at the Defense Enterprise
Computing Centers (DECC) and will leverage existing
DISN services and new services like the Unified Video
Dissemination System (UVDS). The UVDS prototype, a
funded Defense Acquisition Challenge Proposal
supported by DISA and the Air Force, provides the basis
for a DoD enterprise-wide, unified FMV architecture
that will provide a common reachback transport,
archival and dissemination for all full motion video.
INTRODUCTION
The improvised explosive device (IED) has defined a
new battleground for a low technology approach to
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and
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TeraLogics LLC
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Dillon Bussert
Booz Allen Hamilton
Herndon, VA
combat the coalition’s clear and unchallenged
technological and force projection advantages in
Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring
Freedom (OEF). Early in peacekeeping efforts, the IED
caused significantly more coalition causalities than any
conventional weapon. 1 From July 2003 to June 2008
there have been 1787 fatalities caused by IEDs. 1702 of
these deaths have been to US forces and personnel. 2
In response to continuing IED attacks, one of the most
effective responses of the coalition forces is the
increased reliance on Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS)
and their primary Intelligence, Surveillance and
Reconnaissance (ISR) product, full motion video
(FMV). Initially, FMV was used to simply provide
improved situational awareness and an enhanced view of
a local area. Local commanders could view suspicious
activity in near real-time and act upon them
appropriately. Other than a few national UAS assets that
were flown from CONUS (Continental United States),
the FMV was locally controlled and locally consumed.
The need for backhaul, storage and dissemination of
bandwidth consuming UAS video seemed overly
expensive relative to the perceived benefits.
The role of FMV as a mission critical tool has evolved
as insurgent forces have increasingly used stealthy
means and refined CONOPS (Concept of Operations) to
disrupt peacekeeping operations. With improved
backhaul and dissemination provided by programs such
as DVB-RCS (Digital Video Broadcast – Return
Channel via Satellite), Task Force ODIN (Observe,
Detect, Identify, Neutralize) and the Global Broadcast
Service (GBS), persistent video surveillance,
collaborative analysis, and networked storage of
historical FMV has led to improved force protection and
infiltration of insurgent groups. Task Force ODIN, an
early effort to provide and share manned and unmanned
aircraft FMV and other intelligence, is credited with 148
1 Andrew E. Kramer. NY Times 5 June 2008.
2 Iraq Coalition Casualty Count. Retrieved June 6, 2008, from
http://icasualties.org/oif/IED.aspx.

sensor-to-shooter handoffs resulting in over 500 IED
emplacers killed, injured or captured through August
2007. 3
This successful counter-insurgency, supported by FMV
dissemination and analysis tools, is possible because
IED attacks do not take place in a vacuum. Insurgents
must acquire materiels, build the bomb, reconnoiter the
target, and finally plant the IED. Real-time video may
expose those planting the weapon, but recorded and
exploited video can reveal concepts of operations,
surveillance techniques, materials used, or even other
individuals involved in the planning process. As a result
this information can lead to capture and elimination of
an insurgent cell rather than just the neutralization of a
single individual device.
As Task Force ODIN has demonstrated on a tactical
scale, the key to this counter IED application is a
common robust framework for encoding, backhaul,
routing, analysis, storage and dissemination for FMV
and related video products. These products must be
readily available over common user networks, adaptable
for a variety of robust and constrained communications
environments, easily integrated into any standardscompliant
exploitation tool and shareable with a variety
of end-users including shooters and other manned
aircraft.
The next evolution of full motion video as a force
protection tool is to extend this tactical asset from
theatre to the DoD Enterprise to support common
storage, access and dissemination of full motion video
for all sensors including unmanned and manned aerial
platforms, ground and stationary sensors. In order to
leverage FMV for its expanded operational role, an
enterprise-wide DoD solution is necessary for a unified
approach to this ISR asset. Because of the cost,
complexity and inherent synergies associated with a
centralized video solution, full motion video is the ideal
enterprise application.
ENTERPRISE FULL MOTION VIDEO
In 2000, the US Air Force (USAF) requested the
Defense Information System Agency’s (DISA)
assistance with the provisioning of wideband circuits
across the DISN (Defense Information Systems
Network) ATM Service (DATMS) for reachback and
3 UAVs are Decisive Factor in Decline in Iraq IED Attacks.
Retrieved June 6, 2008, from http://defencedata.com/current/page38536.htm.
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dissemination of Predator FMV feeds. A joint effort
established connections between Ramstein, Germany
(common SATCOM Downlink for Predator traffic) and
Langley AFB over DATMS (site of the closest Predator
Common Ground Station) with additional capabilities to
enable USAF personnel to route streams to any
appropriate DATMS user. As additional Predators were
pushed forward, the number of missions disseminated
through Langley increased and exceeded site
capabilities, resulting in Air Combat Command (ACC)
establishing the Predator Operations Center – Nellis
(POC-N) at Nellis/Creech AFB and transferring the
command and control of Predator operations and the
Video Dissemination Hubs (VDH) in FY07. POC-N
distributes the Predator broadcast video to over 38 sites
in CONUS and OCONUS and requires more than
550Mbps of bandwidth on the DATMS network.
In April 2007, the ACC A6 requested assistance from
the DISA Vice Director to develop a strategy and
architecture to resolve the common sensor reachback and
dissemination problem for full motion video. DISA
GE23 was tasked with developing a strategy and
evolution plan for an Enterprise Full Motion Video
service. USCENTCOM (US Central Command) has
also concurred with DISA taking a leadership role which
would include working across Services and DoD
stakeholder communities to reconcile and address video
dissemination requirements.
CHALLENGES TO ENTERPRISE VIDEO
Although full motion video plays a significant role in
missions in OIF and OEF today, reachback, storage and
dissemination of this video has not been consistently
applied across the DoD due to the lack of a standard
architecture, program of record or executive agent, clear
requirements, CONOPS and TTPs (Tactics, Techniques
and Procedures) and network bandwidth.
New sensor platforms continue to be deployed without
any unified operational sponsorship and absent any
coordinated effort to resource, develop, and implement a
common reachback or dissemination method. Each
unique sensor program typically designs and implements
their own architecture, leading to redundant capabilities
implemented by multiple organizations. A common
method for transport is to use the existing Predator
reachback and dissemination paths which has
overburdened the POC-N infrastructure and resulted in
ACC being unable to support the Warrior Alpha, Scan
Eagle, BAM and I-GNAT missions. DVB-RCS has
provided a reachback capability for many tactical
sensors in CENTCOM, but the DISN lacks a unified and

global, dissemination architecture that supports Predator
and tactical video and other Combatant Commands.
Without a common FMV architecture, organizations will
continue to develop stove-piped solutions for each new
sensor platform and mission that is deployed.
A Program of Record or Executive Agent for FMV
dissemination within the joint community is needed to
provide a unified FMV strategy and architecture. The
National Geospatial Agency (NGA) has the charter to
determine video standards through the Motion Imagery
Standards Board (MISB), but that represents the only
point of commonality between FMV outside of the
DISA transmission networks. No single organization
has the responsibility to develop a backhaul, storage and
dissemination strategy across the DoD that can be
implemented by all platforms and systems.
The absence of a documented and validated Joint
operational requirement for a full motion video
reachback and dissemination strategy, architecture and
capability, has led existing strategies to instead focus on
the performance of individual platforms and their
embedded sensor packages. Requirements for
dissemination and a program advocate are needed to
direct the sensor platforms, video consumers and
transport towards a common vision for full motion
video. Video producers and consumers would greatly
benefit from CONOPs and TTPs defining uses for
enterprise and tactical video and requirements for video
quality, storage length and formats. Many current
systems store video for an arbitrary 30 days, or until disk
space is exhausted, but it is not clear what bitrate is
needed and in what situations video should be stored
longer, or not stored at all.
From a communications and computing perspective, full
motion video is extremely challenging to deal with.
Even with state-of-the-art encoding and compression
schemes such as MPEG-4/H.264, broadcast quality
video requires at least a megabit per second of
bandwidth to transmit a single FMV stream. In addition,
to eliminate pixilation and other artifacts, the link must
have minimal jitter. Operational needs often impose
even more stringent requirements on the transmission
systems such as minimal latency, higher resolution and
increased quality of service for sensor to shooter
missions, while network constrained end users require
video at lower bitrates for situational awareness.
Although these programmatic and technical challenges
already exist, operational need for full motion video to
support the Warfighter has continued to grow
exponentially. Near-term efforts such as the ISR Task
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Force, Liberty Ship and Predator QRC (Quick Reaction
Capability) and long term plans like ERMP (Extended-
Range Multi-Purpose UAV) and UGCS (Universal
Ground Control Station) demonstrate how UAS and the
full motion video that they generate will become an even
more critical asset as the Global War on Terror
continues. The already strained reachback and
dissemination capabilities in place today and stove-piped
systems will require a significant overhaul to fully utilize
assets being deployed into theatre.
ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE
DISA is working to establish an Enterprise FMV
Program of Record that will develop a unified strategy
and architecture for full motion video. DISA GE23 has
taken a lead role in establishing a vision for FMV and is
currently working to align existing systems and
technology demonstrations to build a shared Enterprise
DISN Video Service for FMV. The architecture that is
being developed for enterprise FMV consists of three
key components: reachback, processing and storage, and
dissemination of video.
Currently UAS video in CENTCOM is backhauled using
the Predator Primary Satellite Link (PPSL) with feeds
coming directly from the airframe over satellite to Nellis
AFB or DVB-RCS which encodes video at the tactical
ground station and backhauls the multicast stream to the
satellite hub at the Landstuhl, Germany Teleport. DVB-
RCS has served as the main transport for TACVID
(Tactical Video) in CENTCOM since its deployment in
2006, supporting Task Force ODIN and Warrior Alpha,
Shadow, Hunter and ARMS systems. Without a
reachback capability to backhaul, and eventually
disseminate video, these systems would not be able to
broadcast video to BLOS (Beyond Line of Site) sites,
and would only deliver FMV to analyst systems locally
connected to the ground control station or line of sight
handheld receivers.
A common backhaul transport is needed for the backhaul
of FMV from theatre as new tactical sensors are
deployed. DVB-RCS will continue to support TACVID
backhaul as a current solution, but the future FMV
architecture will rely on the two-way Global Broadcast
Service (GBS) and Joint IP Modem (JIPM) to move
video worldwide. As part of a technology upgrade, GBS
will be deploying the JIPM to current and future oneway
GBS Receive Suites to provide TRANSEC
(Transmission Security) and a two-way IP SATCOM
capability. The Joint IP Modem, based on the DVB-
RCS ETSI (European Telecommunication Standards
Institute) standard, is a commercial-off-the-shelf modem,

enhanced to meet DoD requirements for Information
Assurance (IA).
GBS two-way suites will be deployed worldwide to
backhaul data over the Wideband Global SATCOM
(WGS) system. The JIPM modem will connect to a
Joint IP Modem hub installed at the DoD Teleports,
providing the ability to disseminate back into theatre or
connect to an Enterprise Service on the Global
Information Grid (GIG). Two-way GBS will augment
the WIN-T network by satisfying requirements for
TACVID, allowing the WIN-T network to be used for its
primary mission of delivering command and control
data.
Collection, processing and archival of FMV on the
enterprise will be hosted by the Defense Enterprise
Computing Centers (DECC) and will leverage existing
DISN resources. The DECCs are data centers managed
by DISA that provide secure, accredited hosting for
services and applications in CONUS and OCONUS
(Outside CONUS) and are designed with the necessary
infrastructure to support the high throughput, processing
and storage needed for FMV. The DoD Teleports and
DECCs are connected to the DISN optical core and can
transport large amounts of data between sites
terrestrially. An Enterprise FMV service deployed at the
DECCs can consume video being backhauled to the
JIPM hub across the DISN with minimal latency and
jitter, and archive the FMV using high performance
storage networks to support the volume of content being
backhauled over WGS. The DECCs will provide a
centralized collecting point for all FMV in the Enterprise
and provide a common bridge between video producers
and consumers, eliminating redundant and stove-piped
networks.
Services for processing video will be installed on servers
managed by the DECC. On-site system administrators
will configure networks for video streams, monitor
system status and apply security measures to ensure IA
compliance. Enterprise FMV services will ensure
ingested video is available in Motion Imagery Standards
Profile (MISP) compliant format, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4
H.264 video with Key Length Variable (KLV) and
Cursor on Target (CoT) metadata. Standards based
encoding, metadata, and transmission protocols will
provide a common baseline that can be leveraged by
existing enterprise and tactical exploitation tools.
Existing systems will be integrated through web services
interfaces to minimize end user impacts and maximize
interoperability.
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The dissemination component of the Enterprise FMV
service will deliver video through the DISN for
terrestrial connections and GBS for tactical users. The
FMV Service will support transcoding and transrating of
video from the full quality bitrate, which currently
ranges from 1Mbps to 6Mbps, to a lower bitrate to meet
mission requirements and end user network throughput.
Situational awareness can be delivered through video
dynamically reduced to 56Kbps, while FMV for analysis
will be delivered at the highest possible bitrate.
The Enterprise FMV dissemination capability can be
used to transfer Video Distribution Hub responsibilities
from ACC to DISA and redirect Predator consumers to
the DISN Video Services provided at the DECC on the
DISN core, eliminating the need for point-to-point ATM
connections to consumer sites. Predator on-board
encoded video and GBS two-way tactical video will be
sent to DISN Video Services where it will be made
available to consumers on the DISN and over tactical
communications. The DECC VDH on the DISN core
can provide high bandwidth, network diversity and selfhealing
transports to deliver full motion video streams.
UVDS ROLE AND IMPACT
The Unified Video Dissemination System (UVDS)
Defense Acquisition Challenge Program (DACP) was
created to alleviate much of the FMV dissemination
problem. UVDS will provide a prototype and an early
implementation capability that will map the path to the
Enterprise DISN Service for FMV. UVDS is a major
component of DISA’s FMV vision to merge a diverse
group of stakeholders and system architectures into a
robust service that consolidates the FMV ingest, routing
and dissemination services into an integrated standardsbased
delivery system.
Figure 1. UVDS is designed to ingest, route and
disseminate video to enterprise and tactical consumers
The complete UVDS solution consists of five core
architectural components as shown in Figure 1. The
goal of these components is to offload the difficult and

computationally intensive video dissemination processes
onto a single unified system. When fully
operationalized the UVDS system will have direct
access to the all the videos from Predator and the DVB-
RCS system. It will also have access to any network
based feeds that are coming from theater and will be able
to ingest products from exploitation systems or raw
video from storage devices. The resulting system will
improve FMV dissemination by eliminating the
expensive and inefficient piecemeal architecture that
often degrades video quality, adds latency to the FMV
streams, and wastes valuable and expensive bandwidth.
A real world example of UVDS’s potential impact is the
FMV support provided during Hurricane Katrina. In
response the natural disaster, ScatheView (FMV from
manned aircraft) was deployed to provide search and
rescue support as well as damage assessment of New
Orleans and surrounding areas. The system was
deployed with a Rover downlink terminal to receive the
aircraft video and convert it to an analog format. In
order to disseminate the video, the Rover analog feed
was provided to the deployed GBS Theater Satellite
Broadcast Manager (TSBM) which converted it to an
MPEG-2 format and sent it to the GBS uplink for further
dissemination to numerous CONUS locations including
NORTHCOM. At NORTHCOM, the video was brought
back to analog and then re-encoded using Windows
Media and rebroadcast using a SIPRNET network
connection. From beginning to end, the video traversed
wireless and satellite links, was subjected to three analog
to digital conversions and the final product consumed by
the end user was severely degraded from the original.
An Enterprise DISN FMV service based on the UVDS
system could have eliminated all but one of the satellite
hops and all but one of the analog to digital conversions.
Furthermore, the need to deploy non-standard, expensive
dissemination systems in addition to their existing
common user systems such as GBS would be eliminated.
In this scenario, UVDS and the DISN FMV service
could have improved performance, significantly lowered
costs, reduced implementation time and simplified the
backhaul and dissemination solution.
Some of the key benefits of the UVDS system are shown
in Figure 2.
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Figure 2. Key benefits of UVDS include universal
access and automated routing across the DISN
CONCLUSIONS
A common FMV architecture to enable distribution
throughout the DISN supporting processing, exploitation
and dissemination will enable the expansion of FMV
applications to wider variety of end users. This
capability will provide state of the art services for realtime
video streaming, archival and storage and metadata
tagging to enhance the planning and execution of joint
military and coalition operations.
The role of full motion video in OIF and OEF continues
to evolve to counter insurgency and provide force
protection for IED threats. Full motion video
dissemination has moved from a localized asset to a
theatre-wide resource that can be distributed and
analyzed to support multiple Warfighter missions. The
future of FMV is a unified strategy for platforms and
sensors and a common Enterprise architecture for
backhaul, storage and dissemination of video. DISA has
championed the concept of an Enterprise DISN Video
Service for FMV at the Defense Enterprise Computing
Centers to backhaul, archive and distribute video over
the DISN Core. This Enterprise Service will integrate
existing and emerging systems like DVB-RCS, and
eventually two-way GBS and UVDS to develop a joint
vision for the future of full motion video.
The authors wish to thank the following individuals for
their invaluable contributions to this publication: Rose
Thomas, Michael Skowrunski and Rebecca Pham.