Summary
NGEST seeks to develop a new paradigm and corresponding technology for advanced RF sensing systems.
Today’s electronic surveillance systems are unable to handle increasing radio frequency complexity in the spatial (emitter proliferation), power (range), and frequency (agility, congestion) dimensions due to their static hardware configuration. Additionally, today’s systems need to employ exquisite hardware to overcome geometrical challenges. NGEST will overcome the complexity and geometry challenges by autonomously reconfiguring diverse frequency and spatial resources.
Developments in the program will focus on two areas:
- Array Control: Performers will develop new orchestration techniques for array control to reason over the large decision spaces created by reconfigurable hardware. Successful techniques will need to adapt decision-making to non-stationary and unpredictable environments. Additionally, the array controller needs to be portable to different array configurations and instantiations in order to support a wide variety of existing and upcoming systems.
- Signal Processing: Performers will develop signal processing techniques to handle partial information provided by resources. Techniques will be developed to derive new information gain measures for adaptively assessing and predicting the sensing benefits of applying resources while overcoming the large decision space of configuration options.
NGEST is a 33-month program organized into two phases. Both phases will support the objectives of a new paradigm enabling orchestration in complex environments, along with the derivation of diverse and design of array control technologies.
NGEST Phase 1 will focus on modeling and simulation within a government-defined testbed. The phase 1 work will derive the optimal array composition for mission flexibility. Phase 2 will focus on prototyping, testing, and measurements in laboratory and outdoor environments. Performer teams will implement and integrate real-time orchestration software onto prototype hardware developed by the government team.