TOYON RESEARCH CORPORATION — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: N20A-T024

Description

To support Navy Live, Virtual, and Constructive (LVC) training for surface fleets during periods of long transit, the Navy would like to consider alternative communication paths that can link shore based trainers and simulation capabilities with trainers and training systems afloat. To support full spectrum training during the training events, there is a desire to selectively turn off communications systems to replicate the degraded environment.  When the real world systems are turned off, then current training paradigms, i.e. the “white cell” training data are also cut off. The proposed effort will consider shore-to-ship and shore-to-aircraft alternative communication paths.  For the shore-to-ship path we propose to use a commercial SATCOM solution that uses an innovative distributed aperture approach for superstructure blockage mitigation, RF over fiber, and a coherent combiner.  For shore-to-aircraft communications, will evaluate the viability of different satellite communication-based network topologies to support surface and airborne platforms during forward-deployed training operations, connecting live aircraft participants with the LVC NCTE network.  The initial concepts for consideration are (A) Air link via Low Earth Orbit satellites (e.g. Elon Musk proposed constellation or Iridium NEXT), and (B) a carrier hub and spoke approach, and (C) use of existing L-16 networks.