A Pattern of Life Integrated Classification Engine (PoLICE) for RF Situational Awareness

In recent years, radio frequency (RF) situational awareness has attracted the interest of many DoD programs. Its practical application in analyzing the behavior of both friendly and adversarial units from a new RF signal transmission perspective offers versatile utility to a broad range of DoD-related scenarios. It is critical to understand how the RF spectrum is used by different RF applications, how the emitters behave in a given operational environment, and which types of transmissions behave in a distinctive way in order to better comprehend the immediate situation and locate potential threats. In this proposal, we propose an RF situational awareness solution that is well-equipped to deal with a large amount of RF signals collected from a congested environment in near real-time. The proposed pattern of life engine, named PoLICE, consists of three main components: the RF data collector, signal database, and PoLICE. The data collector consists of a software-defined radio (SDR) receiver and a signal preprocessor, which is able to capture the RF signals in the target frequency band and extract the features of the intercepted signals. The data collector is deployed on Navy platforms and sensor units on the battlefield. The PoLICE module is implemented as a web service deployed on a server or any equivalent platform such as a distributed edge network. The PoLICE module ingests the collected signal data from the databases and sends the corresponding signal information to each pattern of life (PoL) analyzer for pattern learning and anomaly detection. The results of PoL analysis will be displayed to the operators and analysts through our GUI, which can be accessed from anywhere using any device. With this solution, the human operators and analysts are able to receive alerts and direct their focus to abnormal signals instead of being overwhelmed by a vast amount of intercepted RF signals. Our solution supports different types of deployment, including the standalone mode where all components are deployed on a single Navy platform, and distributed mode, where different components can be deployed to different platforms/infrastructures and connected through Navy networks.