SYNAPSE: Synergistic Airborne Networking Analysis, Provisioning, and Systems Assessment Environment

ABSTRACT: As part of our proposed Synergistic Airborne Networking Analysis, Provisioning, and Systems Assessment Environment (SYNAPSE) effort The Design Knowledge Company (TDKC) will identify an approach for modeling and understanding the challenges, tradeoffs, and impacts of partial mesh architectures for military airborne networking. Specifically, TDKC will develop an assessment methodology and framework that will enable technology explorations and Phase II system development. In addition to the subject research (airborne networks), we believe that SYNAPSE will provide a template for future work involving functionality enhancement. Importantly, SYNAPSE"s math model and optimization-based approach will provide quantitative metrics that can be used to justify future funding and efforts. BENEFIT: The benefit to the Air Force can be concisely summarized by the need. As of 2011, the stealth assets in the United States Air Force do not have a low-observable, interoperable data transfer protocol. The Department of Defense clearly sees this as a pressing issue, as evidenced by their allocation of 900 million dollars of funding to address it. Much of the original and contemporary research conducted in this area has been in the domain of wireless networks (WiFi and sensor), and cellular networks. Directional radio-frequency (RF) communications provide benefits in a variety of metrics. For small-scale sensor nodes, directional communication can reduce power requirements, or increase transmission distances. SYNAPSE will be multi-objective, but in a military context will likely focus on low-observability metrics, followed closely by performance metrics like robustness, latency, and connectedness.