Adaptive Radio for RObotic Warfare (ARROW)

Reliable communication system is the backbone of every tactical mission. From deployed troops to law enforcement officials, lack of reliable communication increases risk and compromises safety. These challenges are further exacerbated when unmanned ground robot vehicles are operated in urban scenarios with severe multipath due to cluster of buildings along with active transmissions from unfriendly jammers. A cognitive communication system must adapt to contested operating environment and mitigate interferences from nearby parallel operating radios, intentional hostile jamming and multipath fading effects. The SDR communication system can be leveraged to provide agility to the radio in terms of operating frequency, temporal-spatial diversity, transmission rate and power to suit the varying operational requirements and channel conditions. We propose Adaptive Radio for RObotic Warfare (ARROW), a MIMO enabled software defined radio that adopts robust jammer-resilient strategies in its physical layer as well as jammer avoidance mechanism by the cross-layer protocol stack by applying optimized dynamic spectrum access to sustain undeterred communication in remote hostile contested environment. ARROW is tailored to meet the high data rate requirements pertaining to multimedia data transmission (sensed imagery, video and captured audio) in a congested and/or contested environment.