ACRE: Advanced Combat Radio Environment

The Advanced Combat Radio Environment (ACRE) is a high fidelity, real-time, open source modeling and simulation framework for radio-frequency propagation and wireless communications. The framework is designed to integrate directly into simulation and gaming platforms such as Unreal Engine. This lets researchers and developers using those platforms to take into account the performance and reliability of radio communication systems used by troops, aircraft, and vehicles in realistic environments, in real time. ACRE’s integration into Unreal Engine during the Phase I will provide a comprehensive C++ Plugin API.  This API will then utilize Unreal’s Blueprints Visual Scripting system, providing users the ability to easily build complex wireless network models directly in Unreal’s editor. ACRE provides multiple propagation and scattering models including various ITU models, ITM, ITWOM, COST231, Okumura-Hata, and n-ray multipath models. The framework also has a antenna modeling system that can support a wide range of antenna types. Digital performance is evaluated with the computed channel models using a number of commonly used modulation and coding schemes. The Phase II effort will expand on the support of ACRE in Unreal Engine and other platforms, as well as build on the complexity of the wireless communications modeling capabilities in ACRE.