SBIR-STTR Award

We plan to develop a Virtual Radio Frequency (RF) Environment for testing Command, Control, Communications (C3) systems. Testing the large tactical C3 systems requires fielding hundreds of nodes and providing thousands of signals/messages to meet the operational requirements. This is very expensive and often the large numbers of systems are not available. Our Virtual RF Environment (VRE) would allow a few representative C3 systems to be immersed in an environment of hundreds of virtual emitters and exercised through various scenarios of operation. This virtual environment will interact with real radios/communications systems to stress them as they would be in the real world. Thus, the VRE will permit Hardware-in-the-loop and Software-in-the-loop testing.

Keywords:
Rf Propagation, Modeling And Simulation, Antenna And Host Platform, Networks, Virtual Rf

The DataSoft Virtual Radio Frequency (RF) Environment (VRE) functional prototype provides a system for immersing a few representative Command, Control, Communications (C3) Systems-under-Test (SUT) in an emulated environment of virtual emitters and realistic environmental RF channel effects to stress them as they would be in the real world. The VRE Channel Emulation impairs signals delivered between SUT radios, and between SUT radios and Virtual Radios, in a manner that reflects (in real-time) the realistic aggregate effects induced by the simulated environment on the signals being transmitted between those systems, in scenarios with large numbers of nodes. Our VRE Channel Emulation methodology is to recreate the bit error rate (BER) and bit error burst characterization (BEBC) induced by emulated channel conditions on the digital bit-streams that are encoded in the radio signals being transmitted between radios. This prototype implements the end-to-end VRE capability for virtual emitters and realistic environmental RF channel effects for a limited number of SUT radios and virtual emitters, while developing the VRE system architecture that can then be scaled to 100 virtual systems and 7 real systems.

Keywords:
Rf Propagation, Modeling And Simulation, Networks, Virtual, Channel Emulation, C3, Testing