Defense Agency Awards Raytheon Up to $155 Million Contract to Develop an Interoperable Network GatewayReference: Raytheon
Image: Mercury
Raytheon Company has been awarded a contract by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to provide a cost-effective, highly capable military wireless network interoperable gateway. The contract provides Raytheon $24.4 million for one year. Options would extend the contract to 2012 and bring the potential value to $155 million.
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.
"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," said Jerry Powlen, vice president, Network Centric Systems Integrated Communications Systems. "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.
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. 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.
From DARPA's webiste:
The Mobile Ad hoc Interoperability Network GATEway (MAINGATE) program will develop the next generation Network Centric Radio System (NCRS) with additional capabilities and an assured affordable unit price to the user. MAINGATE will create a radio gateway that enables legacy analog and digital communications systems to be internetworked and integrated into a heterogeneous network tolerant to high latency and packet loss. The technologies developed for the program will permit affordable, tactical, real-time, high fidelity video, data, and voice services to be deployed in a networked environment to support tactical operations in maneuver or dismounted operations for line-of-site and beyond-line-of-site communications on the move and at the halt. A unique characteristic of the MAINGATE program is the integration of a "default" IP radio network as part of the gateway. The network will include the integration of adaptive communications architecture, flexible routing architecture, and heterogeneous application services.
