Future wars may likely be fought in settings where opposing forces are hard to distinguish from civilians and therefore difficult to track or attack. To meet this challenge, an agile army should be aided by ground and air sensors for wide-area data collection, an intelligent and robust communication infrastructure, and strong analysis, reasoning and decision support. Robust wireless communication links in complex environments and with possibly hostile jamming is a longstanding goal for the Army. During the last decade, significant achievements have been accomplished in commercial wireless technology. These achievements have centered around spectrum efficiency, power management, fading mitigation and to enhance mobility. However, they do not in general address battlefield Mobile Adhoc NETwork (MANET) communication networks. Our research focuses on new challenges that arise from the need to establish reliable, high speed, multi media links within a large, and dynamic, mobile network of users that are robust to jamming, interference, fading and also difficult to detect by third parties. We plan to exploit High Performance Computing as a powerful tool to achieve these goals. We have divided our work into 4 broad areas.

Fundamental Limits of Performance

Robust Coding and Transmission

Improved Receiver Methods

Cross Layer Methods