Perspecta Inc.’s applied research arm Perspecta Labs has received a prime award for work on low-cost, resilient tactical radio communications under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Resilient Networked Distributed Mosaic Communications, or RN DMC, program.
The contract, which represents new work for the company, has a potential total value of $18.5 million over a 45-month period of performance, if all options are exercised.
“We are excited to design, develop and demonstrate low-cost, resilient long-range communications for challenging non-line-of-sight radio environments,” said Perspecta Labs President Petros Mouchtaris. “With innovative use of tiles, our solution will deliver a high-performance tactical radio communications solution which is flexible, robust and has significantly lower risk of detection, interference and jamming.”
The directional antennas and high-powered amplifiers currently used to support long-range tactical communications in remote areas are expensive and vulnerable to jamming and interference. The RN DMC program aims to deliver resilient, long-range tactical communications via self-forming, self-healing “mosaic” antennas made up of small, low power and cost transceiver elements (tiles) that can be hard-carried by warfighters and hosted on ground vehicles, high-altitude platforms and satellites.
Perspecta Labs is to prototype, implement, test and validate an adaptive distributed array system solution that works with existing tactical radios and unmodified tactical waveforms.