The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently awarded Raytheon [RTN] a one-year $24.4 million contract to provide a cost-effective, highly capable military wireless network interoperable gateway, the company said.
Options would extend the contract to 2012 and bring the potential value to $155 million, Raytheon added.
The Mobile Ad-Hoc Interoperability GATEway, or MAINGATE, will integrate any combination of heterogeneous military, civil or coalition radios into a single network to facilitate communication among disparate systems, according to Raytheon.
“Our MAINGATE solution enables legacy analog and digital communication systems to be networked. It includes an affordable, two-channel, high data rate, next- generation network-centric radio system,” Jerry Powlen, vice president, Network Centric Systems Integrated Communications Systems said. “We continue to build on our Internet Protocol-based networking experience to deliver the most advanced systems to our troops at a much lower cost than other systems in development today.”
The unique architecture of the MAINGATE system overcomes the limits of most networking systems in use today. It allows for many more users to join the network at the same time and enables more than 30 different military and civil radios to communicate with one another while concurrently providing a high-capacity, mobile network, the company added.
One of the key technologies used in the system’s development is Raytheon’s Mobile Ad-Hoc Networking protocols. These MANET protocols enable the MAINGATE system to be mobile, allow nodes to join or leave the network and scale to a very large numbers of systems, the company said.
Other technologies incorporated into the MAINGATE system include disruption-tolerant networking, which is designed to overcome disruptions inherent in wireless, line-of-sight communications systems; dynamic spectrum access to establish and maintain communication in congested radio frequency or noisy environments; and multi-input, multi-output technology to improve performance in urban environments, according to Raytheon.