SBIR-STTR Award

The Battle Force Tactical Network (BFTN) is the only Allied/ Coalition option for providing HF beyond line-of-sight command and control (C2) in non-SATCOM or SATCOM-denied anti-access area-denied (A2AD) environments and serves as a primary backup for SIPRNET (Secure Internet Protocol Router Network) in the absence of satellite communications. Protecting this critical asset requires technological advances like MagiQs Spectrum Sentry (MSS) a single point orchestration engine capable of monitoring the entire HF spectrum while identifying, categorizing, and deploying agile countermeasures to suppress dynamic sources of interference. Modernizations to the BFTN system and waveforms (BRSE and RoCCE) will need significant improvements in dynamic range and interference immunity across the full HF band to manage emerging threats. MagiQ Technologies is well positioned to enable this, having delivered similar systems (Agile Interference Mitigation System AIMS) to the DOD, and has a top team of RF & signal processing experts who produce cutting edge interference mitigation solutions. MagiQ is well positioned to provide complementary cancellation hardware, algorithms and a high-dynamic-range HF digitizer (SPIRAL). MSS is architected to integrate these and/or third-party appliances into a unified system yielding significant improvements to SNR (>10dB) and dynamic range (20+dB) to make the worlds most reliable HF systems.

Benefit:
The market for active interference mitigation across all RF bands is expected to grow dramatically over the next several years given growing trends of spectral crowding and increasing density of antennas on military and even commercial assets. MagiQ has developed an impressive set of active interference cancellation capabilities and related technologies. The MagiQ Spectrum Sentry (MSS) technology suite and algorithms are also applicable to VHF, UHF, and higher bands; in fact, many were originally developed at higher bands. At the heart of the MSS is the Orchestration Engine (OE), a unified interference management solution designed to orchestrate the actions of MagiQ and third-party countermeasures to achieve the best possible communications throughput at any frequency. Successful deployment would make a critical contribution to the DoDs spectrum dominance objectives in all RF bands. There are expected to be significant C4ISR systems deployments, and there are planned deployments of thousands of radio systems that could all benefit from variations of MagiQ Spectrum Sentry (MSS) technology. The inclusion of third-party companies will bring new ideas and technologies to the table. Together multiple specialists in this space should be able to achieve more than in separate disjoint efforts. MagiQs Agile Interference Mitigation System (AIMS) has progressed significantly since the initial shipments to the Navy in 2018. In 2018, AIMS drew a lot of attention as it was the first demonstration of cancelling hopping waveforms without a reference tap. Since then, a clear path has been demonstrated to halve the volume of the equipment. Most interestingly of all, MagiQ has increased the instantaneous 40dB cancellation bandwidth by a factor of ten, from 12MHz to 120MHz. Before the Navy was vulnerable in this band. Now it has the potential to harden the system and fully dominate this frequency space. In a separate development effort, the Interference Cancellation System (ICS) we are developing for SOCOM is designed to suppress local high-power jamming transmissions by over 70dB, allowing SOCOM radios to receive critical communications data. We are very excited about this technology because we see it as a stepping stone towards full-duplex communications. (Full-duplex involves the use of the same frequency for both transmission and reception at the same time). Although this is very challenging technically, there has been a lot of progress in the last decade as the capabilities of chips used digital signal processing techniques have expanded and RF chips have both improved and dropped in cost. The prize is large an approximate doubling in spectrum efficiency is expected, possibly more as it might tend to accelerate the trend toward smaller cells that we have seen the last two decades in the cell-phone sector. The cell-phone providers are very interested though so far they are mainly watching as the military has pushed the technology along.

Keywords:
interference cancellation, interference cancellation, High ENOB, EMI, Electronic-attack, digital signal processing, Fiber Optic, jammer

MagiQ Technologies is ideally positioned to develop a system to cancel the co-site transmissions the Navy is experiencing at HF frequencies (2-30MHz). In order to maximize transmission of data and generally promote multidirectional connectivity between many points there is an urgent need to receive weak signals at frequencies that are interspersed closely in frequency between active powerful transmitters on the ship. Unfortunately, the receive antennas pick up these co-sited transmissions at extremely powerful levels, and they tend to overwhelm the receive chains and their analog-to-digital converters, leaving them unable to receive the weak signals they could normally receive if the transmitters were off. The best solution to this problem is to use a cancellation system. MagiQ Technologies has more than 10 years of development expertise in this area. We have executed on 4 Phase II SBIRs in directly related topics. We have also executed on two RIF programs to cancel signal both with and without a tapped reference. The use of a referenced canceller provides a great operational advantage in that much more of the received spectrum can actually be utilized for reception. This is mainly because large chunks of received spectrum do not have to be obliterated by notches intended to block unwanted noise from local transmitters. At the same time the transmitters can continue the important work of relaying critical messages without having to stop to allow the receivers to listen.

Benefit:
Cancellation of co-site interference is sometimes necessary in cases where many different radios need to be co-sited in close proximity, such as in vehicles, aircraft or ships with a need for a great deal of connectivity. Communications infrastructure such as cell phone towers can also incur capability or monetary costs due to interference. To date cancellation technology has been too expensive to use much, but new advances are making cancellation become a more feasible option, while at the same time the need is increasing. However, the main place cancellation techniques can advance the public good lies in the smart-phone they carry around every day. For example, Bluetooth and WiFi share the 2.4GHz ISM-band in many cases. This means the smartphone may be subject to outages in its Bluetooth reception while transmitting on WiFi, for example. To mitigate, the Bluetooth hops and both connections can rachet down their data-rates to reduce error rates. Often, intentionally or unintentionally, a time-division approach has to be used. This has a severely negative impact on throughput, though typically for applications requiring only moderate bandwidth and where latency is not an issue the consumer does not notice. A very effective canceller would allow the use of on-frequency full duplex. With this technology full bandwidth transmission could occur in both directions on the same frequency at the same time. This is technically hard people have been trying to make this work for over a century, with some recent success, but historically it was always competing against nearly free spectrum and the commercial case was previously hard to make. In recent decades however the cost of spectrum has increased exponentially. At the same time technical advances at the component level, and advances at the system level (like this program) are driving down the implementation cost of full-duplex. Another use of cancellation, also in cell-phones, is to reduce the resources that need to be poured into filters to separate different frequency bands from each other. To achieve isolation, filters have to have high rejection at the other frequencies, and this can result in expensive designs with demanding specifications. The physical size of the filters is often the primary concern nobody wants a bulky phone. Cancellation techniques could instead provide most of the required isolation, allowing the use of tiny, low-cost filters with reduced specifications. At the phone level this will allow a slimmer design, provide room for other functionality, and may also reduce over-all cost. Importantly, full-duplex could allow expanded use of the spectrum in the dead-band that typically lies between the two bands a filter is design to separate. And, most importantly, spectrum can be used in both directions at the same time. This would be a true paradigm shift in the spectrum allocation world and would essentially double the publics resources with respect to spectrum.

Keywords:
Sky-Noise-limited, High-Frequency, RF-Interference, Interference-mitigation, High-dynamic-range, HF, cancellation