Army assesses "self-healing" waveform for platoon-level communications
Jun 30, 2010
By Edric Thompson, CERDEC Public Affairs
FORT MONMOUTH, N.J. -- U.S. Army began an assessment of a waveform that could help separated squads maintain communications in spite of rugged terrain and obstructions, during an annual integrated capabilities event at Fort Dix June 25.
U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command’s communications-electronics cen¬ter conducted a 36-node assessment of the Soldier Radio Waveform in an operationally stressed field environment. This was done to gauge the network’s ability to support platoon-level data and voice traffic from the rifleman to the squad leader.
When squads spread out, they can potentially loose communications due to obstructions in the terrain. The SRW is “exciting” because the network “self heals” its fragmented connectivity by leveraging other squad radios using the waveform, said Eric Williams, C4ISR OTM lead for the assessment.
“This waveform looks for other radios from the same squad and hops back through these nodes. So if the furtherest man out can’t talk directly to the squad leader, this waveform will actually use the other radios to create a path from radio 15 back to radio one,” Williams said.
“The assessment focused on the actual program of record waveform from the Joint Tactical Radio System, Joint Product Executive Office information repository. This was a good opportunity to see if it could grow to support a large number of nodes and meet the stated requirements,” said Glenn Briceno, chief architect for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance On-the-Move – or C4ISR OTM.
“If it turns out that the waveform has no issues, we’ll see if there are any bugs on the hardware side that need to be flushed out so we can get the best possible solution out to Soldiers in the field,” Briceno said.
Researchers used 36 nodes, or individual points of presence, to represent a typical platoon-sized element of four squads. Live dismounts in the field interacted with each other and stationary nodes placed on stakes, passing scripted voice and situational awareness traffic from the squad leader down to the lowest level rifleman and back, Briceno said.
The technical assessment was conducted at the C4ISR OTM annual integrated capabilities event. C4ISR OTM is an R&D pro¬gram within the Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center that eval¬u¬ates tech¬ni¬cal appli-ca¬tions and matu¬rity for emerg¬ing net¬work¬ing, sen¬sors and C4ISR-enabling plat¬forms on a year-round basis.
C4ISR OTM Event 2010, serves as a venue for assess¬ing and enabling Future Force capa-bil¬i¬ties while iden¬ti¬fy¬ing tech¬nol¬ogy accel¬er¬a¬tion oppor¬tu¬ni¬ties into the Cur¬rent Force.
The 36 node SRW assessment is one of approximately 25 critical activities that directly support the C4ISR OTM E10 campaign goals, said Jason Sypniewski, chief of the C4ISR OTM Integrated Event Design and Analysis branch.
“This activity supports overarching Army initiatives, such as the Army Network Modernization Strategy, by investigating how we can build an SRW network to meet its max requirements in the field,” Sypniewski said.
C4ISR OTM will build on the assessment results by integrating these efforts into the E10 architecture in order to support the capability assessments and other SRW-related tests for this year, Briceno said.
“The next phase will be to take the network we’ve stood up and integrate it with other system-of-systems that are in line with the capability sets 2013-2014 and the Future Force architecture. We’re looking at integrating SRW with a WIN-T type element that will notionally flush out a Stryker Brigade Combat Team and a Heavy Brigade Combat Team based force structure,” Briceno said.
C4ISR OTM sup¬ports mile¬stone deci¬sions for pro¬grams of record, help to mit¬i¬gate risk for Army Tech¬nol¬ogy Objec¬tives, facil¬i¬tate R&D tech¬nol¬ogy tran¬si¬tion to pro¬grams of record and aid in devel¬op¬ing those tech¬nolo¬gies through technical readi¬ness levels, Sypniewski said.
During C4ISR OTM E09, the Army was able to eval¬u¬ate the com¬plete future force net-work stack. This marked the first time that the Sol¬dier Radio Wave¬form (SRW), the Wide¬band Net¬work¬ing Wave¬form (WNW), the High¬band Net¬work Wave¬form (HNW) and Net Cen¬tric Wave¬form (NCW), were inte¬grated with respec¬tive Bat¬tle Com¬mand and ISR assets and assessed as one network.
“There’s no pressure on the technology providers when they bring a capability here because this isn’t a pass-or-fail venue: this is a test, assess, analyze and fix type environment, “Sypniewski said.
“We build a little, test a little and see if we can break it because that’s critical information in terms of the capability’s development. Once we get to that breaking point, we start taking steps back to assess what went wrong, we work with the developer to fix it and we test it again,” Sypniewski said.
E10, which began June 1, is scheduled to continue execution through Sept. 15, at Fort Dix, N.J.
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