Spectrum aware Sensor Optimized Signaling (S2OS)

AiRANACULUS, a Boston-based start-up working in the area of Intelligent RF and Networking solutions proposes Spectrum-aware Sensor Optimized Signaling (S2OS) System that will perform intentional overlapping of the transmit channels and leverage advances in Multi-User Detection, Co-channel Signal on Signal Interference Cancellation and Cognitive Spectrum Awareness technologies to provide significant (>2X) increase in capacity of the data uplinks from the sonobuoys. Our technology has been developed on wide variety of Navy (CAMICA, OSCAR), Army (WADER) and IARPA programs. Everyone wants more bandwidth, but radio spectrum is a precious limited resource. An obvious way to deal with bandwidth needs is to reduce the data size, whenever possible, especially if the application and nature of signal source allows it. Signal captured by sensors of Sonobuoy is not random information, in fact, can be compared to audio signal spread over range of frequency. It is common practice to compress audio signal for storage or transmission. Sonobuoy sensors capture these signals from different sources where the spectrum is often sparse with signal energies concentrated around several different frequencies, with large bandwidth occupied by mainly noise. To increase the uplink data throughput, we first reduce the signal size to be transmitted by filtering out non-signal-bearing frequency regions. This process can be efficiently implemented by spectral segmentation and energy based selection using polyphase filter banks. After the signal extraction, the data is further compressed and additional frame information to restore the signal at the receiver side is appended to generate the transmit frame. This sensor optimized signal is then transmitted using RF channels that are intentionally overlapping in frequency either partially or even fully, so that the overall required bandwidth that must be assigned to multiple users of the network decreases.Ā In the aircraft, a special receiver with Multi-User Detection (MUD) capability can demodulate these signals with overlapping channels without suffering from adjacent or co-channel interferences. The MUD receiver is designed as an Appliquķ such that capacity enhancements as a result of overlapped channels may be achieved with no modification to the generic demodulator. Generic nature of MUD receiver allows interference cancellation for wide variety of signals. In addition, we can improve the performance even further by using digital post processing with low complexity iterative MUD processing. Based on these technologies that we already have proven to work, our proposal aims to improve and expand the technologies to the sonobuoy sensor signal applications. By combining efficient spectrum-aware sensor signal processing and high-performing state-of-the art interference cancelling multi-user receiver, we can achieve the goal of data throughput increase that can be demonstrated not only in the lab but also in the realistic field trials.