DoD developing Linux-based "Soldier's Radio"

Blind RMS Groupie writes "According to this article at EE Times, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is developing a voice/data unit for infantry soldiers based on multiple StrongARM processors and embedded Linux. The radios will link together in what is characterized as a "mobile, ad-hoc, peer-to-peer network that uses frequency-hopping technology to avoid communication intercepts and location-finding capability.""

Comments

Clarifications from someone who worked on it.

[Tim]

It's odd that this just made it into the media, as this project (known as SUO SAS) has been around for the better part of 2 years now--not counting the previous phases of development, which go back several more years.

While the article got a lot of things right, it was also a good portion of hype. I worked on the networking software for this (which is built on top of the TAO CORBA ORB, btw), and while it is conceivable that it might scale up to 10,000 nodes, it is unlikely to do so in it's current form (well, as of a few months ago, anyway). In fact, we faced more or less the same scalability problems that any ad-hoc wireless network system faces, plus the added complexities of having to guarantee consistent tactical picture maintenance (how do you keep a consistent data 'picture' of an entire battlefied among 10,000 separated nodes, with no guarantees on connectivity, or even addressing between any two particular nodes? Now, how do you tackle message-based quality-of-service on top of this mess?). So, for those of you wondering, the problem tackled by this system is a lot bigger and more complicated that than faced by peer-to-peer filesharing systems (think superset of the gnutella problem), and the algorithms we were developing weren't perfect--or even good, necessarily. The problems facing ad-hoc networking are certainly as unsolved and difficult as they were before.

Another important note is that while we ultimately got our way and were able to use Linux for development (partly because we absolutely refused to work with a platform where we didn't have access to the network stack code), it was kind of an uphill battle with DARPA to do so. Linux still isn't qualified to be running on any type of deployed military system, and believe me, we heard about it constantly (I still shudder at the thought of trying to do our development in Windows...)

All that said, the concept of the project was/is pretty cool, but, as always, reality is less dramatic than its press release. If you want more info on the project and related research, here are some links:

Info on geo-routing algorithms (directly relevant to the SUO SAS problem)

A blurb on SUO SAS by SRI

The DARPA ATO web page describing SUO SAS

Re:Why They Chose Linux

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Better watch out for Colonel Panic then...

Remember DARPA's purpose

[Infonaut]

I've posted about this before - but remember that DARPA's charter is not to develop new technologies that are necessarily used "out of the box". There's a reason they're called the "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

There's a higher than even chance that this will be akin to a press release about .NET from Microsoft. The initial concept of the product and the actual (if any) end result are likely to have significant variance.

However, this is part of a larger DoD trend toward providing soldiers with ubiquitous communication. Believe it or not, individual soldiers in the Army generally still don't have personal radios down past the squad leader level.

While it's been pointed out that special ops units have lots of sophisticated personal communications devices, for the average soldier or marine on the ground, there's a lot of room for improvement.

This DARPA project is one out of many different options the military is exploring, so be happy (or upset, if you're not fond of the military) that they're exploring multiple paths before committing to a massive restructuring of their tactical communications setup.

Also as has been noted elsewhere, signal-hopping has been used for years by the US military in SINGGARS systems.

Why They Chose Linux

[Cheshire Cat]

I understood the DoD chose Linux over Windows because they didn't want their soldiers to take orders from General Protection Fault! :)