CoHeRent nOn-developMental wavEforms (CHROME)

Ziva proposed approach called CoHeRent nOn-developMental wavEform (CHROME) addresses the need for an Army squad to be able to communicate with a remote parent vehicle over restrictive terrain in a manner which reduces vulnerability to enemy interception/detection (LPI/LPD) and improves Anti-Jam (AJ) capabilities in congested/contested environments.  CHROME leverages Ziva’s field demonstrated capability of enabling a distributed coherent and mobile ad-hoc collection of RF radios to coherently align and automatically beamform retrodirectively with N2 array gain to a remote node without any PPLI or geolocation information and enables improved LPI/LPD and AJ performance. While ad-hoc distributed coherent technologies have been demonstrated CHROME will apply distributed beamforming techniques to non-developmental waveforms for cost effective communication systems with greater range and power-efficiency and lower detectability then current communications technologies.  CHROME’s ability to update existing tactical radios with this capability via software/firmware update is highly desirable and the approach should maximize portability and backwards compatibility to tactical radio systems which will support widespread implementation and reduce overall cost.   The basis of CHROME is Ziva’s suite of algorithms which have been demonstrated in aircraft, small Tier 1 UAS and on the ground to coherently align radio clocks, local oscillators in phase using open-loop (implicit or retrodirective) beamforming to cancel channel impairments.  Ziva’s open-loop approach operates in highly dynamic channels with high doppler, high levels of multipath and where any node can be master and does not require a special HQ node with TFLOP processing capability which significantly enhances military reliability, maintenance, and reduces vulnerability to single point of failure as well as broadens the CONOPS. Our lightweight algorithms require minimal number of gates/ registers on commercial grade Software Defined Radio’s (SDR) and thus can be ported to existing and future military SDR’s as an applique.   In Phase I Ziva proposes a) provide guidance on which classes of waveforms are expected to be directly compatible with retrodirective coherent beamforming and identify a key NDI waveform for coherent beamforming implementation, b) perform a detailed analysis on selected waveform and develop MAC extensions to the selected NDI waveform to enable necessary channel resources for the TWTT necessary for coherent array operation, c) create a system simulator to be able to predict coherent system performance (including AJ, LPI, and LPD) for mounted or dismounted up-echelon comm to ~ 5 km  including real-time push-to-talk (PTT) voice and PLI payloads with emphasis on latency and reliability, as well as streaming video and data transfer to meet >1Mbps.