Engineering skills for autonomous airborne networked operations

1. April 2006
Products and Engineering Services
Project Management Enterprises, Inc. (PMEI)
7900 Wisconsin Avenue
Bethesda, Maryland 20814
Tel: +1-301-652-5306
Fax: +1-301-469-9001
Contact: Prasad Nair (pn@pmei.com)
(Information herein presented are confidential and proprietary to PMEI and may be subject to disclosure and use restrictions) 1
pn@pmei.com

2. Radio product family – v4.0
April 2006
(Information herein presented are confidential and proprietary to PMEI and may be subject to disclosure and use restrictions) 2
pn@pmei.com

3. EFR 400-xx series radio family – v4.0
April 2006
Air host Interface (ASI) tablet
Airborne Network VDL Radio
Physical size: 11.6(w) x 1.6(h) x 9.8(l) in.
Physical Size: 6.11(w) x 2.02(h) x 8.27(l) inches
Weight: 5.5 lbs
Weight:2.987 lbs (1.355 kg)
(Information herein presented are confidential and proprietary to PMEI and may be subject to disclosure and use restrictions) 3
pn@pmei.com

4. Hardware connectivity diagram
April 2006
(Information herein presented are confidential and proprietary to PMEI and may be subject to disclosure and use restrictions) 4
pn@pmei.com

5. Applications supported
April 2006
Autonomous peer-to-peer position location and network discovery

Low latency direct peer-to-peer messaging (automated chat)

Assured uplink broadcast services (multiple applications)

Surface movement monitoring (local and remote) with integrated

voice and text-to-voice advisory services
COTS internet connectivity to ATC, AOC and APC networks (with

firewall and encryption as required)
IP ground based network management for DNS and aircraft

domain address resolution
Airborne Relayed Communications Service (ARCS) provides

over-the-horizon and Beyond Line of Sight (BLoS) connection
management to any discovered peer or ground center
APC and AOC support via out-of-band signaling

Back-up surveillance with dynamically modifiable report rate

Security and authentication services

(Information herein presented are confidential and proprietary to PMEI and may be subject to disclosure and use restrictions) 5
pn@pmei.com

6. Multi protocol radio communications
April 2006
Supports COTS TCP/IP communication

Built-in:

 ICAO complaint variable rate ADS-B built-in
 GPS engine (not needed for AT)
 TDMA RF network synchronization access
 Station Identification Reports (SIRs) for net and IP handling
Standard DSB/AM voice operations

Optioned multi-channel receive with real-time

dynamically assignable transmitter
Ethernet and serial line connectivity to airhost/

shipboard systems
(Information herein presented are confidential and proprietary to PMEI and may be subject to disclosure and use restrictions) 6
pn@pmei.com

7. Key technical features - I
April 2006
Multi- channel, multi-receiver product line

- multiple receivers operate on independent channels to receive products and services simultaneously
- Frequency agile transmitter services all off-board transmit requirements
- Shared antenna with bus interconnect permits diversity radio operations (transmit and receive)
Station Identification Report (SIR) [ADS-B like/ can be a back-up]

- lat, long, baro-alt, geo-alt, true_track, category, call_ sign, altitude_rate. (Variable rate
transfer reports permit dynamic rate changes to accommodate specific airspace needs)
- ipv4 address (autoconfig in v6) / hopsToGo
Assured Broadcast Product Distribution (Datafeed)

- autosegmentation and reassembly of large products
- ack (and selective reject) of fragments to optimize delivery schedule
- use of target location to optimize delivery schedule (e.g., aircraft on final MUST have l
latest arriving-atis)
- use of aircraft existence to know who has received what and who needs
what to dynamically manage broadcast product mix
e-Mail

- delivery to arbitrary ground host
- delivery of air-air occurs directly if in LoS of each other (else air-ground-air)
- delivery from arbitrary ground host goes direct to next hop ground
station
(Information herein presented are confidential and proprietary to PMEI and may be subject to disclosure and use restrictions) 7
pn@pmei.com

8. Key technical features - II
April 2006
Instant messaging (XMPP)

- delivery via non-jabber gateways to arbitrary client
- delivery of air-air occurs directly if in LoS of each other else via ground-proxy
- delivery to and from arbitrary jabber ground server
Web browsing

- proxy in air/ground for compression and to push DNS lookups from transiting the RF
Cloudburst

- VoIP and other isochronous services
Arbitrary IP

- routes arbitrary IP packets either directly air-air or air-ground if no air-air path
- supports full 16 levels of priority using the ToS field as the priority indicator
- handles packets up to 1500 bytes (standard Ethernet frame) and is a valid IPv6
subnetwork (IPv6 requires a minimum MTU of 1280 bytes)
(Information herein presented are confidential and proprietary to PMEI and may be subject to disclosure and use restrictions) 8
pn@pmei.com

9. Airborne network capability demo configuration
April 2006
Satellite Datalink Service Provider
(Irridium or similar)
Satcom interconnect to be completed
Multiple routing algorithms available
(est. 1 month effort) Air-to-air routing AND
Min_Time_Max_Performance presently implemented
Air-to-ground via satellite gateway
(single assured route)
(gateway on-board for test/demo)
Air-to-air routing and
Air-to-ground comm.
Remote
Ground Station
Internet
Ground Station
Surface Networks
(Information herein presented are confidential and proprietary to PMEI and may be subject to disclosure and use restrictions) 9
pn@pmei.com

10. Example NAS ARCS network lay-down for enroute
and terminal operations proof-of-concept
April 2006
BLoS network enabled VDL system
IP information transport above MAC layer
IP Packet routing with optimized hop count policy
implemented for performance
Route recording for loop detection and optimization
Standard SMTP mail and IM services (a/g and a/a)
Station ID Reports maintained for all a/c with ADS-B
fall-back at Ground Control Center(s)
Oceanic approach/ departure services and gulf operation monitoring
(Information herein presented are confidential and proprietary to PMEI and may be subject to disclosure and use restrictions) 10
pn@pmei.com