The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory of Rome, N.Y. has awarded Spectracom and its academic partner, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), a contract to continue research on wireless network routing protocol to support war fighter communications for the future of military airborne networks. The contract, worth about $300,000, augments previous USAF-sponsored work started in 2006 and, aligns with Spectracom’s strategic initiative to serve the Aerospace and Defense market with high reliability network solutions for synchronizing critical operations with an expanding technology portfolio.

Spectracom’s CTO John Fischer commented “This award complements our on-going research and development for next-generation networks. We understand the need for secure and reliable network communications and are committed to providing innovative solutions to the military through the application of leading-edge work of academic partners such as RIT.”

The Air Force contract builds on the work of a team that includes Nirmala Shenoy, director of RIT’s Lab for Wireless Networking and Security and the inventor of the Multi-Mesh Tree (MMT) routing protocol. Shenoy said, “MMT offers a high degree of network efficiency through its scalability and use of information across traditional network protocol layers in a compact manner. We will enhance the MMT functions and its performance to meet the goals of the Air Force by introducing cognitive self-learning behavior in the protocol.”

The contract supports the DoD’s effort to deploy an IP-based network to interconnect mobile airborne platforms, and ultimately, to the military’s Global Information Grid. However, the difficulties of networking in the airborne environment pose extreme challenges. John Matyjas, Air Force Research Lab, said, “Our goal is to achieve fast, efficient, and secure routing that performs under highly dynamic and hostile conditions of the battlespace.” Matyjas added, “We are interested in approaches to apply cognitive techniques to further improve the performance of routing protocols.”

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