The success of military operations depends on assured, reliable, effective, available, secure, synchronized situational awareness, and command and control at every military echelon, from the continental U.S. to the forward-deployed warfighter. STO seeks system concepts and enabling technology that will provide assured high-bandwidth mobile wireless capabilities that operate with or without access to commercial infrastructure. The goal is to deliver relevant and timely information to the warfighter anytime and anywhere, providing effective communications to U.S. forces while denying the same capabilities to our adversaries. Approaches to this goal could include developing new system concepts and technologies that improve network availability, increasing network capacity and scaling, enhancing spectrum efficiency in congested spectrum, tolerating network degradation, providing man-made and natural electromagnetic interference mitigation, defeating network reconnaissance and surveillance, and counter-denial of service. Emerging threats exploiting commercially-leveraged technologies introduce additional challenges.
STO is interested in approaches that leverage commercial infrastructure when it is available and use the capabilities and cost-efficiencies of commercial handheld devices, components, and applications. These approaches will need to consider the reliability, robustness, and security of commercial infrastructure, devices, and applications in a military environment. Also of interest are assured operations in compromised and complex electromagnetic environments, while controlling the adversary’s capability to operate in these environments.
In addition, STO is interested in approaches for efficient spectrum utilization and performance in the presence of interference, and dynamic and efficient use of space/time and access to new modalities such as high frequency RF and optical polarization. Intra- and cross-modality (radar, communications, and sensing) spectrum access techniques; spatial reuse through higher frequency operations; interference avoidance and tolerance; and large-scale testing of complex RF environments are of special interest.