Long-range terrestrial communications the goal of Silvus-DARPA pact
NewsMarch 16, 2021
LOS ANGELES. Silvus Technologies has won a contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) worth as much as $13.1 million as part of the DARPA Resilient Networked Distributed Mosaic Communications (RN DMC) program.
Under the terms of the DARPA program, Silvus will develop a distributed beamforming/beamnulling solution with the aim of enabling resilient, long-range terrestrial communications of up to 100 km using multiple collaborative radios distributed over hundreds of meters.
The RN DMC pogram grew out of DARPA’s investment in so-called mosaic warfare, a concept in which large numbers of lower-cost systems (called tiles) are used to undertake complex mission functions in a coordinated fashion; a patchwork or "mosaic" of these interconnected tiles enables such functions as command and control, communications, and sensing to be performed with high resilience and reliability.
The Silvus entry for RN DMC -- dubbed Mosaic Scattered Wide-Area Resilient Network (MScWRN or M2N -- is intended to enable spatially distributed beamforming and beamnulling with minimal communications required between tiles, with mosaic clusters that are able to bridge large range gaps while seamlessly interoperating with the rest of a traditional Silvus mesh network.
Dr. Babak Daneshrad, chief executive officer of Silvus, said of the project: “The reliability of long-range communications utilizing multiple radios distributed over large distances is a critical component in DARPA’s vision of mosaic warfare. The RN DMC program will enable the continued development of our M2N solution, and we look forward to demonstrating its matured operation.”
