Access to spectrum is also critical for future swarm of UAVs, In a vision shared by innovators, entrepreneurs, and planners in both defense and civilian contexts, the skies of the future will be busy with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Unseen but central to the realization of this vision is wireless communication within and between those future fleets of UAVs that is reliable and resistant to both unintentional and ill-willed interference. “If these UAVs can’t communicate, they don’t take off or they don’t operate the way we want them to,” said Josh Conway, a program manager in DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office. “As wireless communication becomes part and parcel of all kinds of platforms and devices in the coming years, we will need assured communications, especially for command and control, but for other things too, like data transfer.”
The unprecedented consumer demand for wireless mobility and data consumption has resulted in reduction and fragmentation of spectrum of defence. Only 1.4 percent of the RF spectrum from 0 to 300 GHz is available exclusively to the U.S. government. This has resulted in complex Defense, spectrum management within and between the armed services, and any errors in the spectrum management plan may result in the denial of critical strategic and tactical links. The second is relatively easy for adversaries to target such a small part of the RF spectrum allocated exclusively to the government through jamming or electronic attack.
Modern networks and platforms rely on access to the radio frequency (RF) spectrum for communications, radar sensing, command and control, time transfer, and geo-location. Electromagnetic interference, due to congestion in the spectrum or malicious jamming, can have catastrophic effects. Countering such interference is particularly important for unmanned platforms.
To address this challenge, DARPA rolled it out in the summer of 2014, the Hyper-wideband Enabled RF Messaging (HERMES) program seeks to provide an assured link for essential communications by developing a jammer-countering capability that is orders of magnitude beyond the state-of-the-art. Assured access to the RF portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is critical to communications, radar sensing, command and control, time transfer, and geo-location.
To achieve this dramatic leap in jam-resistance, the HERMES program focused on systems that work with extremely wide RF bandwidths. Techniques such as direct sequence spread spectrum DARPA can exploit extremely wideband RF links, to provide a significant significant coding gain, to mitigate the effects of RF jamming and interference that threaten to disrupt important military operations while also providing operationally useful data-rates.
The broad spectral spreading of the signal assure that the transmit power in any spectral bin will be insufficient to cause unintentional interference. If successful, the HERMES program could provide unprecedentedly reliable channels of access to the RF spectrum without pre-planned spectral allocation, allowing for a new model of communications.
UCSD Researchers have developed an innovative “optical comb” receiver that retrieves sub-noise “spread-spectrum” signals has been evolving from a rough tabletop phase, to a streamlined desk-top version, and is on its way to a chip-scale finale that could became the basis of new assured channels of communication for unmanned aerial vehicles and other platforms and devices that require wireless connectivity.
DARPA’s proposal was in line with DOD’s Electromagnetic Spectrum Strategy 2013, which called for ensuring the access to the congested and contested electromagnetic environment of the future, by adopting new agile and opportunistic spectrum operations , and through systems which are more efficient, flexible and adaptable and adopting new technologies capable of more efficient use of the spectrum and reduced risk of interference.
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