Wireless Communications

With only limited bandwidth available, tactical forces rely on ATL's technologies to provide reliable, stable networks for wireless communication.

Objectives

Increasing requirements for near-real-time situational awareness and joint C4ISR are driving the development of tactical networks that deliver seamless, interoperable communications across the battlefield. In response, the defense department has created new tactical-battlefield communications systems, like Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS), Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T), and Global Information Grid. We are developing technology enablers for tactical wireless, communications to deal with critical bandwidth bottlenecks and wireless reliability and robustness. We are advancing wireless communications in several challenge areas:

• Increased availability of bandwidth for wireless communications.
• Reduced energy requirements for unattended sensor networks.
• Increased intelligent management of wireless communications.
• Increased reliability for wireless communications in urban environments.
• Covert communications.

Key Technologies

We are developing the following key communications technologies for next- generation wireless communications:

• Dynamic spectrum allocation that increases spectrum access by a factor of 10 over today's static allocations without interfering with current communications systems.
• Policy management to automate and control spectrum planning and deconfliction for the battlefield. Policy specifications with temporal and spatial attributes are used to define any frequency-protected service volumes required by legacy systems.
• Environment sensing for automatically seeking radio-frequency unoccupied segments of the spectrum.
• Intelligent control over a software-defined radios, allowing autonomous, cross-layer adaptation.
• New protocols to reduce a communication's energy requirements by a factor of 100 for low-duty-cycle sensor networks.
• New waveforms for covert communications and reliability in urban environments.
• Signal processing techniques for high data-rate communications with very high spectral efficiency of 20 bps/Hz while operating at multiple frequency bands in a mobile, ad hoc network urban setting.

Applications and Transition Opportunities

We are having discussions with several program offices to transition neXt- Generation (XG) communication technology (dynamic spectrum allocation) into key Lockheed Martin programs (JTRS-AMF and WIN-T). XG technology also has many potential applications in civil sector.

Wireless Communications is one of several Business Areas for the Embedded Processing Laboratory