Furtim Comms

The Department of Defense (DoD) must ensure spectrum dominance when operating in hostile areas in order to maintain reliable and secure communications and operational effectiveness. Adversaries monitor the spectrum and may engage jammers to degrade or deny DoD missions that require access to the spectrum. Spread spectrum and frequency diversity techniques are often applied to lessen or avoid the impact of these attacks. These techniques are designed to both hide the signal of interest (SOI) below the ambient noise, and to thwart the intended impact of enemy interference, that of interrupting the data link. Other techniques applied to counter these threats have involved spatial diversity techniques such as antenna beamforming and jammer nulling. The objective of the current SBIR/STTR is the development of a new and completely different approach to the design of an anti-jam and low probability detection waveform – a technique called Underlay Communications. AuresTech and the University of Illinois at Chicago plan to leverage our expertise in AJ, LPI/LPD and Machine Learning to extend and improve the current state of the art of underlay communication. Our solution combines classical signal processing methods with Machine Learning (ML) to provide a solution that meets the Army’s needs. Underlay Communication methods as described in [A1, A2, A3] utilize the Canonical Correlation Analysis approach to achieve very high levels of interference suppression in tactical wireless communication scenarios. This powerful technique is based on some assumptions, which if not true can cause the technique to fail. These assumptions are:that the interfering signal snippets captured in the multiple (2 or more) capture views are uncorrelated,that the signal-of-interest experiences an acceptably small amount of multi-path variation from one view to the next, andthat the interferer does not drive the RF front-end of the receiver to operate in its nonlinear region. AuresTech Inc. has teamed with University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) to leverage their combined expertise in advanced DoD and commercial communications and will together extend the CCA-based underlay communications technique to address the deficiencies defined above and as described in the Technical Objectives Section below.