SBIR-STTR Award

Analytics has developed a technique which we call mhc, or modified huffman coding. our proposed utilization and implementation of this innovative tool would require no modifications to existing naval c3 systems. this phase i sbir will investigate the feasibility and usability of a unique form of encoding that we have developed. our conceptual design for this system, we believe, can compress typical naval message content fields by a factor or 70-80 percent -that is, an approximate 4:1 to 5:1 reduction on communications bandwidth, without sacrificing interoperability or compatibility with existing naval and dod systems, with jintaccs, and possibly enhancing cryptographic strength in the process. analytics envisions the proposed mhc converter to be in the form of a preprocessor that can be embedded in a standard navy communications terminal, or placed on a line between a terminal and the c-3 processing system. in this embodiment, the mhc converter would be transparent to the user and to military communications systems including autodin, ddn, janaps and related systems. the technical objective of this phase i sbir is to analyze, test, and simulate our unique concept for data compression. the proposed research effort will culminate in a device that will minimize the negentrophy of the total naval communication system.

In phase II, analytics will construct message and text compression hardware (match). match will utilize algorithms to compress naval messages. the algorithms were developed and implemented in a software environment in phase i. the algorithms use variable length codes to represent characters and character strings. an analysis of a data base of representative messages is used to determine frequency of occurence of character strings. phase ii will work with a data base of 20,000 vlf messages to construct an optimal dictionary to encode these messages. an analysis will be conducted on the noise level of the vlf channel, and appropriate error detection and correction algorithm will be implemented. the hardware will be designed to support these algorithms along with being able to easily be loaded with new dictionaries and other software updates. at the conclusion of phase ii analytics will deliver match that has been tested in a laboratory and also in an operation environment. a configuration management plan will be developed to support match for use in any operational environment.