Ad-hoc Aperture for Coherent Emission (AACE)

High performance (directional) phased array antennas increase achievable data rates and communication ranges, enable secure links, and in an Electronic Warfare (EW) setting, increase power on target, and reduce fratricide. However, todays monolithic arrays are too heavy, expensive, and power hungry. The ability to form an ad-hoc phased array, from randomly distributed single antennas would be a huge step forward. However, challenges include the (unknown) rapidly changing relative antenna and target positions and orientations, scattering from the environment, Doppler shifts, equipment instability including clock drifts, electrical delays that vary with temperature, and interference. Therefore, it is essential to design a coherent communication and EW solution to achieve high power gain and improve signal quality at receivers and increased Jamming to Signal Ratio (JSR) at the target. Since transmit nodes are not physically connected, they need to coordinate with each other for distributed coherence communications between self-organizing transmitters and a cooperative receiver or cohere energy on a non-cooperative (non)radiating target.