Present-day wars and conflicts as also wars of the foreseeable future are likely to see an ever-increasing employment of Remotely Piloted Platforms (RPVs), drones and applications of robotics.
These would be used as weapons and surveillance platforms, logistics and medical aid as well as in high-risk tasks such as mine-field clearance, breaching and dealing with defences based upon obstacles.
An essential part of systems that perform these tasks is a reliable, secure, survivable and timely-assured ICT Infrastructure.
Since all these tasks are carried out in areas easily influenced by the adversaries, the ICT infrastructure can only be rolled out after it is sufficiently dominated by own forces.
Deployable ground-based ICT platforms need to operate on deployment and stability time that matches the operational timelines. In case of aerial operation platforms like RPVs and drones, the communication system needs to be an aerial triple play network that rolls out at the speed of aerial platforms that must also support swarming.
In terms of reach and timely availability, Satellite and High-Altitude Aerial Platform (HAAPS) as ICT infrastructure is an excellent solution. The major constraint of these is cost of provisioning continuous communication footprint and survivability.
Aerial Platforms: A communication infrastructure that is inbuilt into the aerial operations platform and rolls out as the aerial operation package, flies, and supports plug-and-play with guaranteed authentication is an operationally effective system.
High-capacity IP Mesh MANET is an excellent aerial triple-play network. All entities (C2, ISR, weapons, Logistics) are packaged to perform a task that can efficiently and simplistically be connected in the mesh.
This will reduce latency to even support direct connect between ISR-C2-Weapon. The expanse of this Aerial-Mesh can easily cover a space of 120 km x 120 km.
LPI/LPD, this along with Interference Avoidance System (IAS), low latency, light weight, BW of 80 Mbps and sub-sonic rollout speeds makes it an excellent choice for aerial triple-play NW. Each Mesh can support up to 120 drones and multiple Meshes can be interconnected to increase the SWARM size. Exicom’s Mesh MANET was the communication system used by two of the Mehar Baba competition winners.
Remotely Piloted Vehicles: Unmatchable latency (under 6 msec), adequate BW, NLOS, LPI/ LPD, adequate ranges that supports the standoff ranges of RPVs, multi-channel modulation with MIMO, FIPS certified AES 256 and light weight and dimensions (as low as 60 gm and size 14 cm x 7 cm x 3 cm) make it an ideal choice for RPVs. The communication system is effective for electronic, mechanical and hydraulic controls in RPVs.
These MANET have been implemented in Main Battle Tanks, Unmanned Surface Vehicles, Unmanned Ground platforms like Combat Engineer Platforms, weapon and surveillance platforms etc.
Because of its unmatched NLOS (penetration through even thick stone walls), Low latency / LPI & LPD multi-channel modulations, our MANET has been successfully integrated in Robotics models being developed by DRDO.
