Adaptive Wavelet Compression for the CEC Network

The Navy is developing the Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) communications network to allow ships to share air defense radar and fire control data among a battle group. Current problems in the CEC's communication links are: the power required to meet operational specifications is higher than desired and the data throughput of the links is not as high as desired. FASTMAN has developed FASTWAVE, a wavelet-based compression technology which produces high quality compression of many different types of data. We have also developed a low-power chip set to implement FASTWAVE. Because FASTWAVE is based on wavelets, its bitstreams can readily be integrated into the CEC's encryption scheme. Our objective in this project is to determine the feasibility of using FASTWAVE to provide the Navy with a compression technology within the CEC to compress multiple types of sensor data. It will be cost-effective and power-efficient to develop FASTWAVE as a common support application for data compression.