Subject: [NEXTEL-1] UC San Diego Researchers Win Pentagon Funding To Develop Ad-Hoc Wireless Networking Technology For Battlefield Environments

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2004 12:18:57 -0500

March 22, 2004

UC San Diego Researchers Win Pentagon Funding To Develop Ad-Hoc Wireless
Networking Technology For Battlefield Environments
By Michael Abrams

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 Jafarkhani; 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 Universit

--
    "NEXTEL-1 IT'S NOT JUST NEXTEL"
  Note The New address
Subscribe to Nextel-1: http://www.groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/NEXTEL-1

  "NEXTEL2 FOR iDEN SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS"
Subscribe to Nextel2: http://www.groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/NEXTEL2

  "WIRELESS FORUM HOMELAND SECURITY GROUP"
     The Complete Resource for Wireless Homeland Security.
Subscribe to WFHSG:  http://www.groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/WFHSG

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Buy Ink Cartridges or Refill Kits for your HP, Epson, Canon or Lexmark
Printer at MyInks.com.  Free s/h on orders $50 or more to the US & Canada.
http://www.c1tracking.com/l.asp?cid=5511
http://us.click.yahoo.com/mOAaAA/3exGAA/qnsNAA/61FxlB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

-- 
    "NEXTEL-1 IT'S NOT JUST NEXTEL"
  Note The New address 
Subscribe to Nextel-1: http://www.groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/NEXTEL-1

  "NEXTEL2 FOR iDEN SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS"
Subscribe to Nextel2: http://www.groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/NEXTEL2

  "WIRELESS FORUM HOMELAND SECURITY GROUP"
     The Complete Resource for Wireless Homeland Security.
Subscribe to WFHSG:  http://www.groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/WFHSG

Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEXTEL-1/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
     [email-masked]

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
     http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/