SBIR-STTR Award

Optemax has developed proprietary secure mobile optical wireless technologies with inherent LPI/LPD data link capabilities, that would be ideally suited for tactical and unmanned aerial vehicles. Our research has been focused on beam to beam steering for tracking and communicating with moving objects, seamless interfaces from free space optics to a fiber optic infrastructure, pulse stretching to overcome atmospheric interferences, free space optical networking and quantum cryptography, all of which Optemax has branded "BeamNetTM ". These are are key components for utilization of the optical regime for mobile high speed free space optical communications. The BeamNet technologies promise to deliver up to a terabit per second communications to moving objects over a 10 - 15 KM range before needing repeaters. This speed is 18,000 times faster than Wi-Max (802.16), and significantly more secure due to its narrow beam width. However, Optemax also has obtained a patent on quantum cryptography that can be utilized in ultra-secure environments. Our Beamnet technologies also have a complementary satellite component which can be used in conjunction to the UAV/tactical products to transmit data security throughout all parts of the globe at unprecedented speeds

The purpose of this Phase II project is to advance the technology readiness level and provide a proof of concept on key mobile optical wireless technologies licensed exclusively by Optemax, LLC from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Although free space optics (FSO), as a discipline, has been around for 30 years, and many commercial applications were attempted in the late 90¡?s, significant challenges remain. Those challenges are the effects of weather (clouds and fog specifically), atmospheric distortion (which limits the range of the signal), pointing and tacking (to allow client mobility) and networking (to interface with industry standard networks and allow for path diversity). The feasibility and challenges of these technologies were described in Phase I. In this Phase II project we will advance weather penetration concepts and demonstrate path diversity and FSO networking which we call BeamNet„§.

Keywords:
Optical Wireless Networking