WNaN radios selected for US NIE 13.1 experiment

The US Army has selected the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) wireless network after next (WNaN) radios to support the Network Integration Evaluation (NIE) 13.1 experiment at Fort Bliss.

The WNaN team consists of DARPA; Raytheon BBN Technologies, which provides the applications, networking and integration capabilities for this next-generation platform; and Cobham Sensor Systems LLC, which provides hardware.

The WNaN radio provides a robust mobile ad hoc network with spectrum access, disruption tolerant networking and multiple cooperative transceivers on a compact, handheld platform.

These networking technologies allow the radios to operate in dense signal environments without dropping calls, facilitate mission command through the ability to set up as many as 128 call groups, and maintain situational awareness even when communications are interrupted.

’Dynamic spectrum access’ senses which spectrum is in use and automatically shifts to the best available frequency. Disruption tolerance allows the network to continue to advance message traffic toward its intended destination even when there are outages or interruptions and then delivers the message when the necessary path becomes available. Multiple transceivers mean that the network can scale in density or size and operate efficiently over multiple channels.

The system participated in NIE 12.1 as a System Under Evaluation following a series of demonstrations where it surpassed scalability requirements by successfully transmitting voice and data traffic across 102 nodes in a tactical environment.

“We have tested the WNaN network extensively, and WNaN performance exceeds the demands of today’s army,” said Dr Jason Redi, senior director of engineering and WNaN principal investigator for Raytheon BBN Technologies.

In coordination with DARPA, the US Army purchased 125 Version 4 (next-generation) the radios in support of the NIE 13.1 experiment. The version 4 radio reduces size, weight and power requirements compared with the earlier version used at NIE 12.1 and it increases battery life to more than 10 hours.