Adaptive Free Space Optical and Radio Frequency Network Centric Cooperative Communications

In the Phase I project, IAI has developed and implemented a novel Cooperative Communications technique that goes far beyond the current state of the art communication systems. In this new technique the physical layer is designed based on the vision of networked centric communications paradigm. IAI’s design builds a framework for network nodes to share their resources including power and bandwidth to increase the physical link performance and to increase the battery life. IAI is the only research group that has ever implemented cooperative communications scheme on a real time hardware. In Phase II, we take a modular approach to implement our cooperative communication technique on a software defined radio. In this approach we implement and test each module on FPGA based hardware independently then we implement the transmitter and the receiver using these modules. In Phase II Raytheon and IAI will integrate cooperative communications technique in Raytheon’s tactical network simulation environment to evaluate and quantify the improvement in network performance. Once a successful integration is accomplished, Raytheon and IAI develop plans for implementing the technology on one of Raytheon’s SDR radio platforms. In Phase III Raytheon will use the Phase II work to actually implement and test the technology.