URBAN: Unified Tactical Radio Integration with Body Area Networks

The objective of URBAN is to develop a comprehensive technology that establishes a seamless connection for soldiers’ body area network (BAN) with the tactical network designed to transition into the Nett Warrior system. URBAN uses a diverse set of sensor modalities that provide a complete situational awareness related to vital, biological/physiological, and environmental health of soldiers. These sensors communicate with a chest-mounted Android phone connected to soldier’s tactical radio that represents the “end-user device” of the Nett Warrior system. URBAN implements energy efficient flow control protocol at the Android phone to control the measurement collections from sensors based on the standardized credit-based BLE flow control. URBAN also implements a distributed flow control algorithm on the link between smart phone and tactical radio node to control the sensor data traffic flow injected into the tactical network and to mitigate flooding and buffer overflows. URBAN utilizes machine-learning techniques to process and analyze raw data collected from the sensors to infer features, detect anomalies and events, and make prediction and assessments of soldier’s health and environment conditions. We will demonstrate the URBAN prototype under Nett Warrior emulated scenarios in the lab and field environment.