Study to define an unmanned vehicle based digital cellular telephone payload system

There has been continuous improvement in commercial Land Cellular telephone technology since deployment of the first analog system - Advanced Mobile Phone Service - in 1984. Each new generation of air interface embodies increasingly sophisticated signal modulation schemes providing improved spectrum utilization and network capacity. Today, a state-of-the-art commercial digital Cellular Telephone system based upon the US IS-95 air interface standard is available. This system uses Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) which has its roots in the demanding Military environment. the CDMA approach combines direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) modulation for superior RF spectrum utilization, inherent privacy, soft handoffs of mobile subscribers between cells, low probability ofinterception and detection, processing gain and forward error correction, and multipath immunity. The significant advantages of this comercial CDMA technology can be relaized in the battlefield environment by placing appropriate Cellular Telephone base station functions in an Unmanned Vehicle's payload. By judicious apportionment o fthe functions among the Unmanned Vehicle's system elements, each Unmanned Vehicle equipped with the Cellular Telephone Payload will constitute a robust communications cell on the battefield providing auytonomous intr-cell connectivity to mobile subscribers. the result will be secure, real-time voice, data, mixed voice and data, FAX, and imagery coomunicated between widely dispersed friendly forces on the battlefield with capability to conenct the Unmanned Vehicle's Cellular Network to worldwide telephone assets and MIlitary communications networks.