Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Ad-Hoc Wireless Networking Technology For Battlefield Environments

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2004 12:15:31 -0500

University Of California - San Diego

Date: 2004-03-23

URL:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/03/040323071414.htm

Ad-Hoc Wireless Networking Technology For Battlefield Environments

Electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego will
lead a six-university effort to enable troops to set up mobile
communications networks on the battlefield, using lightweight wireless
equipment during commando raids and in other hostile
and rapidly changing environments. The project to develop "space-time
processing for tactical mobile ad-hoc networks" will
receive approximately $3 million in funding over three years from the
U.S. Department of Defense, which will have the option
to extend funding to $5.25 million over five years.

The project for the U.S. Army is one of 31 approved last week by DoD's
Multidisciplinary Research Initiative (MURI)
program, a $146 million, five-year effort targeting topics of
"exceptional opportunity" for DoD technologies and applications.
"MURI topics have very aggressive technical goals for objectives that
cannot be accomplished with existing technologies," said
James Zeidler, principal investigator on the project and a research
scientist and senior lecturer in the Electrical and Computer
Engineering department of UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering. "We are
developing some fundamentally new concepts and
approaches, and it will be a very exciting project."

Ad-hoc networks form when communications peers find each other without
the benefit of centralized network control systems.
Deployment is vastly more complicated in fluid tactical situations where
special challenges emerge, and where the price of
dropped communications can mean loss of life and mission failure. Among
the difficulties: peers must stay in touch while having
to move around, maintain stealth, and avoid enemy jamming and
eaves-dropping attempts. The network must sustain itself
when communications partners go out of range or are damaged or
destroyed. Noted Zeidler: "The technology could also be
useful to firefighters, police, and other responders to fires,
earthquakes, terrorist attacks or other emergencies that have
knocked out pre-existing communications infrastructure."

Equipment that would be used in a tactical ad-hoc network ranges from
mobile radios mounted in backpacks, laptops, and
hand-held computers to antennae mounted on vehicles such as tanks and
Humvees that come and go, and even airborne relays
to route data to and from command and control bases and headquarters.

One target of innovation for the project is the network protocol suite,
a reference to the many programs used to manage
communications. These typically are grouped into discrete steps or
layers, an arrangement that robs a network of an ability to
adapt to changing conditions. One goal of the project is to set up a
cross-layer algorithm that will enable the different layers to
join together in decisions, for example to decide to rotate an antenna
in response to lagging signal strength, or to rapidly switch
partners in response to movement.

The team will also explore the use of new antenna technology, coding,
and error-correction systems. One focus will be
multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) devices endowed with multiple
antennas. This is new technology that shows great
potential for enabling communications in less than optimum
circumstances. In a recent study by Brian Banister, one of Zeidler's
graduate student researchers, a ten-fold boost in channel capacity was
achieved using an eight-fold asymmetric MIMO channel
compared to a one-way channel, given the same signal-to-noise ratios on
each channel. MIMO devices format signals using
space-time coding, where the receiver analyzes positional differences
between pieces of a signal and the timing of the signal's
arrival when decoding messages.

The funding will support the work of faculty and graduate students on
the UCSD campus, including at the Center for Wireless
Communications (CWC) and the California Institute of Telecommunications
and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)²]. Four
Jacobs School electrical and computer engineering faculty will work with
Zeidler on the project: Rene Cruz, Larry Milstein,
John Proakis, and Bhaskar Rao. Research faculty members at other
locations include UC Irvine's Hamid Jarfarkani; J.J.
Garcia-Luna-Aceves at UC Santa Cruz; Yingbo Hua and Srikanth
Krishnamurthy at UC Riverside; as well as A. Lee
Swindlehurst and Michael Jensen at Brigham Young University. Additional
funding from the Canadian Defense Research
establishment will underwrite research by professor Simon Haykin at
McMaster University in Hamilton in Ontario, Canada.
Michele Zorzi of the University of Padua, Italy has collaborated with
Professors Cruz and Krishnamurthy on numerous
publications in this technical area, and will also participate in this
project as a visiting professor at UCSD.

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