The Defense Department is always looking to get ahead of threats and realize new innovations. One to the top innovations of interest is a potential Wi-Fi killer, or at least an alternative — something called Li-Fi.
"How many software engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb? None, it's a hardware problem," Lt. Gen. Alan Lynn, the director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, said during a keynote at the Defensive Cyber Operations Symposium in Baltimore June 13, using a joke to portray this new evolution.
This was the way it used to be, he said, but that is changing. With Li-Fi, which uses light-emitting diodes that would be the equivalent of Wi-Fi, this joke may no longer be relevant in the next 10 or so years as software might be in light bulbs.
Why is DoD interested in this technology? Lynn explained that with the operation of the Joint Spectrum Center, DISA is always looking at how to maximize frequency and the spectrum they have, as spectrum is a finite resource increasingly consumed by commercial, government and military users.
Things that use the radio frequency, or RF, spectrum could be offloaded into the light spectrum taking advantage of Li-Fi, he said.
As a practical example, in the war-fighting domain if one is out in a tent in the middle of nowhere, using a light, it might be infrared but it is still light emitting that information you need, he said. "If somebody tries to come to jam you, they're jamming RF, they're not jamming that," he said, offering that this could be a possibility for the future.
Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for C4ISRNET, covering information warfare and cyberspace.
