Advanced Robust Modulation (ARM)

Naval communications environments, both undersea and through-the-air, are typically more demanding than most applications, offering many exciting challenges and creative opportunities for the communication system designer. Challenges in undersea acoustic, optical, and radio-frequency channels include dispersion, multipath, severe signal attenuation, noise, limited bandwidth, and many other detriments to robust, secure, long-range, high-data rate, networked communications. Shipboard satellite communications also has the added challenges of time-varying Doppler due to ship motion and antenna handover outages. Finally, Turbo codes now allow communications systems to operate at much lower signal to noise ratios, making synchronization more challenging. Fortunately, a creative and new application of wavelets to communications solves many of these difficult problems and will help to reliably and securely connect OSD's undersea assets to the Global Information Grid. Scale-Time Offset Robust Modulation (STORM) is a unique modulation technique that simultaneously possesses the features of robustness, security, high data rate, rapid synchronization and ad-hoc configuration for high bandwidth mobile platform communications. The performance of STORM excels in challenging communication environments. This technique has been described in several recent publications and shows much promise in both undersea and RF communications. It can be used as a stand-alone modulation technique, or as a plug-in to enhance existing maritime communication systems. In addition, the technology shows significant promise for applications in Joint-Tactical Radio System (JTRS), Transformational Communication Satellite (TCS) systems, and commercial SATCOM.