Signaling for Heterogeneous Scalable Networking with Improved Covertness
Abstract
The research goal is to enhance current and introduce new communications networks enabling the efficient control and context-awareness of teams of unmanned vehicles/systems operating in the air, on the ground and in-buildings. The topics include: communication architectures for unmanned autonomous vehicles; ad-hoc simultaneous networks sharing the same set of band; design of subsystems necessary for navigation and path planning; and non-line-ofĂsight operation for real-time monitoring solutions for safe operations. We aim at a basic thin infrastructure for heterogeneous multi-band network that builds on fundamental characteristics of the low-VHF and GHz bands. The key ingredients of low-VHF -- better propagation/coverage and coherence will enable an establishment of an ad-hoc infrastructure that helps in coordinating the rest of the heterogeneous network. The network not only relies on the infrastructure to lead the mobile agents to communication hot-spots, but also provides a large coverage for low-latency message passing in cluttered communication environments. On the other hand, particular care has to be taken to ensure that low-VHF thin infrastructure is robust to intentional and non-intentional interference as well as to easy interception/detection. To achieve this a number of strategies will be employed: sparse/bursty communications, decentralized synchronization/coordination, low power transmission, spread spectrum communications, multi-carrier signaling (without cyclic prefix), per sub-carrier spreading, randomizing delay and frequency offset, random-delay insensitive spreading sequences, as well as delaying important and high-load communications to allow for the mobile agents to access the high-throughput, while intermittent and better protected, GHz hot-spots. Also, the overhead of the GHz communications will be reduced by relying on the highly-present connectivity at low-VHF and hence reducing the overall airtime and latency. In order to achieve significant headway towards thin infrastructure multi-band networking we study: Very brief (bursty and occasional) self-synchronizing signaling for low-latency communications in highly cluttered environments at low-VHF; Bursty signaling for enabling non-centralized pulse-coupled oscillator consensus synchronization for in/through-building VHF/GHz network infrastructures; the low probability of detection of the network signaling under A and B above; Aggregate statistics that can help in improving the distributed MAC-layer protocols and strategies to learning the aggregate statistics in a distributed manner.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- May 06, 2019
- Source ID
- W911NF1910082
Entities
People
- Predrag Spasojevic
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- Rutgers University
- United States Army