A Comprehensive MIMO Centric Solution for Improved Spectral Efficiency of Airborne Data Links

The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have produced missions that have demonstrated the importance of unmanned ground and aerial assets in aiding the warfighter. In particular, the use of UAS in providing ISR data has grown significantly over the last 6 years. The ever increasing use of UAS assets coupled with improved quality and resolution of the ISR information being delivered has created a spectrum congestion that threatens to undermine the success of such missions. Leveraging the unique benefits of multi-antenna processing, we will incorporate five independent techniques that can be easily integrated into any one of the existing air-to-ground data links being used in UAS. The solutions can all be incorporated into a small multi-antenna MIMO (multi-input multi-output) enabled radio with aggressive SWaP, and can deliver 8x to 20x improvement in the overall spectral efficiency of a cluster of communicating parties. BENEFIT: Spectrally efficient air-to-ground links have applications in both the military as well as the commercial aviation arena. In the military, it is the communications of ISR data to troops on the ground and commanders/operators in CONUS. In the commercial realm it is the provision of high-speed internet access to passengers on commercial airlines. Should our work be successful under this SBIR we can not only help the commercial market place, but also due to our unique approach we can leverage many of the parts to produce more robust and cost effective solutions for the military. The development of a prototype system is the first point of entry for discussions with commercial vendors, thus further underscoring the importance of delivering a working prototype within the first half of a possible phase 2 effort.