Distributed Communications & Electronic Warfare

Vadum will develop and simulate a new beamforming protocol for Distributed Communications and Electronic Warfare (DCEW) that will implement distributed TX and RX beamforming algorithms between a cluster of nodes, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), and cooperative or uncooperative receivers. The Vadum approach uses an innovative Master-Slave architecture employing multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antennas to achieve beam steering and beam broadening at minimum overhead cost. Phase synchronization is achieved using a novel hybrid of experimentally demonstrated techniques employing both open-loop and closed-loop synchronization. The hybrid approach enables better beamforming in response to Channel State Information (CSI) and leverages a priori information such as GPS location and tight timing synchronization between nodes. The Phase-I effort includes a comprehensive analysis of ad-hoc beam patterns with respect to number of nodes, position accuracy, time, frequency, and phase synchronization to determine the optimal tradeoff between beam gain and beam width.