DARPA looks to adaptive battlefield wireless nets

A new Department of Defense project is trying to use cutting-edge wireless research to create a tactical radio net that can adapt to keep soldiers linked with each other on the battlefield.

Project WAND, for Wireless Adaptive Network Development, will exploit commercial radio components, rather than custom ones, and use a variety of software techniques and algorithms, many of them only just now emerging in mature form. These $500 walkie-talkie-size radios will form large-scale, peer-to-peer ad hoc nets, which can shift frequencies, sidestep interference, and handle a range of events that today completely disrupt wireless communications.

WAND is part of a larger project by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create the Wireless Network after Next, a complete military communications infrastructure. WAND has two teams of contractors and researchers, with BBN Technologies heading the software development and Tyco Electronics heading up the hardware development.

“The average soldier on the ground doesn’t have a radio,” says Jason Redi, principal scientist for BBN’s network technologies group, and the man overseeing the software work. Radios are reserved for platoon and company commanders, in part because of their cost: typically $15,000 to $20,000 each, with vehicle-mounted radios reaching $80,000.

Click to see: Explanation of what WAND can do

Families of soldiers have bought off-the-shelf walkie-talkies from companies like Motorola and mailed them to troops in Iraq. “It’s a lousy way to communicate but it’s better than what they have now.”

WAND is an attempt to create low-cost radios with intelligent network software that does several things to make communications more pervasive, more efficient and more reliable in the battlefield.

One key technique is adaptive spectrum management. Radio spectrum today is divided into different bands, with each band assigned a particular use, for example, a slice for taxicabs, another for police, another for military use and so on. “But when you look at the actual use of the spectrum, much of it is not being used at any given moment,” says Redi. “Adaptive frequency management lets the radio ‘sniff out’ the empty bands and use them.”