A Portfolio of Coding & Datalink Technologies to Redefine Secure and Reliable Tactical Communication--Open Call Dual Use Technology

This project is to develop next-generation efficient, secure, ultra-reliable, and low latency communication to support military operations in an unpredictable and contested environment. The solution is software-defined, platform and system agnostic. It can be commonly implemented on existing communication hardware or any future systems and platforms, from portable radio in the war zone to Satellite Communication in space. In response to the “resilient and responsive” needs of military communication, we plan to use this software solution in a highly distributed network architecture, in which numerous low-cost and low-power transceivers as data relay nodes facilitate a multi-path, multi-hops, mesh network. This solution is fast and reliable against network errors and disruptions, mitigating the risk of a single point of failure. We will leverage our breakthroughs in coding and datalink technologies to enable reliable communication even if some nodes and paths are not available, and only partial data arrive final destination. This distributed system architecture aligns with DARPA’s interest in Mosaic Infrastructure using lots of low-cost distributed assets in Air, Maritime, and Space Systems. It is similar to DARPA’s Resilient Networked Distributed Mosaic Communications (RN DMC) program.  Our innovative Forward Error Correction (FEC) enables unprecedented error resilience, especially to correct burst errors caused by intermittent connection. We have successfully recovered 16 million consecutive burst error bits. that is 5 orders of magnitude improvement of the state-of-the-art (SOA). This feature is extremely important to AF/SF SATCOM's "anti-scintillation communications performance". This FEC can correct both packet-level and bit-level errors. It reduces the bit error rate (BER) from 10e-2 to 10e-13 with a hard decision decoding that no other existing coding technologies can achieve. The NCG improves the signal-noise ratio and range of coverage without a bigger and more powerful antenna.  With the same coding foundation, our novel data partition scheme can manage thousands of coded blocks without incurring a prohibited computational complexity, which is almost 100X better than SOA. This scheme can fully restore the original data delivered even if only a subset of coded blocks arriving the receiver. The amazingly simple algorithm reduces computational complexity by at least two orders of magnitude and delivers faster processing within strict SWaP limits. The deliverables of this project are a set of software algorithms and libraries. It enables a software-defined system to leverage common coding and datalink technology libraries to significantly improve the agility, reliability, and security of military communication to a new height. This solution can also be used in many commercial applications, from telecommunication, data storage, and cryptography industries.