JTIDS waveform supports multiple simultaneous transmissions by independent terminals operating on parallel subnets within the same geographic area. The designed JTIDS architecture permits up to 128 of these nets to simultaneously operate in a given area, each with its unique frequency hopping pattern. As a practical matter, however, there are several factors which may limit the number of such nets operating concurrently. The primary concern is that of self-interference among the various nts. This interference will also degrade the effective anti-jam performance of the JTIDS system. There is a less obvious limitation on the number of simultaneous coexisting nets which is rooted in the net management of large dynamic networks. Depending on the connectivity requirements of the semi-autonomous coexisting communities which need to exchange information, available slot resources may not support both the internal and external communication needs. Furthermore, any tow terminals may communicate if and they share at least one common crypto-variable. Therefore, the net management issue of communication network saturation also includes a crypto-management issue. The absolute number of crypto-variables held by any given terminal is an important constraint on the number of participating networks with that terminal. All this will be evaluated during the SBIR effort.
Benefit: The importance of network management guidelines extends into numerous military and civilian applications of large spread-spectrum networks. SDIO and TMD are examples of large unit deployments of spread-spectrum distributed networks. Commercial air traffic control and cellular phone systems are two civilian examples of potential spread-spectrum large networks which will benefit from this research.
Keywords: Reed-Solomon coding, Reed-Solomon coding, JTIDS/MIDS, Connectivity, anti-jam, NETWORK MANAGEMENT, brickstacking, crypto-management, network saturation