Enabling Low-Power Tactical Radios Operating in Harsh Environments (The ONR White Paper Tracking Number was never proivded)
Abstract
Currently deployed radios carried by servicemembers and lightweight UAVs consume significant amounts of power (e.g., the Harris PRC117G consumes 60W), leading to a significant weight burden limiting their mobility and performance. Our previous ONR-funded researchinvestigated the design of very low-power radios that can significantly ease this weight burden. Specifically, we investigated use of M-ary FSK as our modulation format, as it is theoretically power efficient and, in practice, amenable to a low-power circuit implementation. Our program resulted in a record-setting integrated circuit that could, for the first time, communicate over a distance of 1km for sub-mW power at 100kpbs for a net 100,000x improvement over the current approach. However, this multiple-order of magnitude improvement only occurs when operating in clean environments without large interferers or, more importantly, active jammers as would occur in harsh electronic warfare (EW) conditions. This is one reason why the Harris device consumes so much power. Interestingly, after a careful literature survey, we found that there are NO low-power radios targeting operation in such harsh electronic warfare conditions. Most low-power radios strive to consume as low power as possible without regard for practical interference or jamming conditions, or without regard to minimizing the probability of intercept. As a result, their tolerable signal-to-interference ratios (SIRs) are very poor (e.g., -10dB at a 2MHz offset), and their ability to operate in the presence of an intelligent jammer or tominimize the probability of intercept is effectively nil. As a result, the focus of this proposal is to augment the results of the previous ONR-funded project towards operation in the harshest possible EW conditions. Fortunately, the selected modulation format ofM-ary FSK is actually well suited for extensions to frequency-hopping and dynamic channel bandwidth allocation approaches, and thuscan offer some intrinsic advantages over conventional designs. It is not easy to enable such features in a low-power manner, but our team has the right level of background and expertise to perform the necessary cross-layer optimization to retain our multiple order of magnitude power reduction over conventional approaches, all while enabling extremely robust operation for EW. This proposal is responding primarily to Technical Area 5. Our primary objective is to enable robust communication across a distance of 1km at a datarate of 100kbps with as low power as possible in both the transmit and receive units. We anticipate retaining our 100,000x power advantage over radios like the Harris one, but in this case with equivalent anti-jam (AJ) and low-probability of intercept (LPI) capabilities. Compared to the low-power radio space, we will improve our signal-to-interference ratio, AJ, and PLI capabilities by >1,000x. These radios could also be relevant to operation in small geographic areas, as described in TA1.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- May 05, 2021
- Source ID
- N000142112470
Entities
People
- Patrick P Mercier
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of California, San Diego