SBIR/STTR Award attributes
Navy Command and Control networks (e.g., Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC)) currently use Single-Beam Antennas (SBAs) with pairwise communications. Multi-Beam Antennas (MBAs) have the potential to greatly increase network throughput and reduce latency. A good scheduling algorithm is needed to take full advantage of MBAs. The scheduler must handle any combination of SBAs & MBAs, heterogeneous platforms, varying communications capabilities/constraints, deadlines, and more. We will use subject matter expertise provided by Dr. Gabriel Rebeiz of Extreme Waves. Dr. Rebeiz is the father of affordable phased arrays used in LEO and MEO SATCOM, 5G, and Point-to-Point communications and has developed multi-beam phased array antennas including the 4-beam Navy CDL system (with ViaSat and BAE). We propose Bottleneck Avoidance for Multi Beam Antennas (BAMBA) which schedules in three steps. First, the Route Finder uses a modified Dijkstra’s algorithm and a Modified Multi-Commodity Flow solver to suggest routes for each data packet. Then, the Bottleneck Route Selector uses bottleneck avoidance techniques to select the best route for each packet. Finally, our tremendously successful Aurora technology creates a fine-grained schedule with exact times of transmission (and intermediate storage when applicable). We have applied similar techniques to many domains, including communications scheduling for NASA’s LunaNet.
