The US military envisions the fielding of large numbers of unmanned air vehicles in the near future that will work in collaboration with existing fixed and rotary aircraft to detect, locate, and defeat enemy forces. These manned-unmanned teams (MUM-T) require networking technologies to support exchanging full-motion video, metadata and voice for situational awareness and control of unmanned air vehicle (UAV) payloads and UAV navigation while maintaining backward compatibility with data links currently used by Navy/Marine Corps UAVs and fixed/rotary wing aircraft. In the proposed program we design, develop, demonstrate, and verify mesh network protocols for the Manned-Unmanned Teaming (MUM-T) network. Aerial 5G celllular base stations are deployed autonomously in support of the network.
Benefit: The MUM-T network is a directional mesh network that supports detection, cueing, tracking, and engagement. A network that can relay Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) products to ashore and afloat command and control (C2) nodes. A network that supports hundreds of inexpensive swarming UAV platforms and manned fixed and rotary wing aircraft. A network that communicates by exchanging data among peer platforms without recourse to expensive and vulnerable external assets, such as satellites.
Keywords: experimentation, Backward Compatibility, 5G, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), Directional datalink, mesh networks, Tactical Airborne Networks, cellular
