Engineering professor Junshan Zhang is working with the U.S. Department of Defense and 11 professors and researchers across the country to create better technology for battlefield communication.
The group is beginning a five-year project after receiving a $7.5 million grant from the Department of Defense three months ago.
Robert Bonneau, program manager at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research in Virginia, said the goal is to design a network that can provide a more consistent and reliable communication method easily adaptable to any environment.
“Right now our networks are really mobile — we need to come up with an underlying theory to track these information dynamics and keep them functional even under the most radically changing circumstances,” Bonneau said.
Zhang said the research group’s biggest challenge is developing a network that can maintain connectivity through mobility.
“We are trying to establish a fundamental network science … in order for us to convey information to soldiers, tanks and airplanes in the battlefield,” Zhang said. “We want to design and come up with an overarching principle that can help us to design battlefield communication networks that are manageable, that can guarantee reliability and guarantee connectivity in contrast to current intermittent connectivity.”
After examining the current systems of communication, its main problem was in consistency because it could not be relied on when soldiers were on the move, he said.
“In the battlefield, soldiers, tanks [and] airplanes … are changing constantly, moving, so they are losing communication through the radio frequency,” he said. “And when one soldier or tank moves and the distance changes, the network falls apart and they cannot talk to each other.”
Zhang added that the current radio frequency communication is also subject to interference and presented a security threat by broadcasting information so others in the area could potentially overhear military communication.
“The DOD is facing a big challenge due to these hospitable environments, so … say soldier A talked to soldier B and then soldier B is talking to soldier C and they would interfere with each other,” Zhang said. “The communications interfere with each other and because wireless communication is sort of broadcast if you transmit information, everybody else who is in the neighborhood … would be able to hear.”
Bonneau said the findings of this research group will be used to help design future communications networks for the military.
“We’re hoping to have a new unified theoretical design that is useful to people designing these networks and come up with basic results to support the infrastructure of the current system,” Bonneau said.
Robert Calderbank, a professor of electrical engineering and mathematics at Princeton University, is also working on the project and said the Air Force could especially benefit from the group’s work.
“The Air Force is particularly interested because the systems they have right now weren’t designed for the environment they are in. When you take current means of communication and put them in the air, they fail,” Calderbank said.
Zhang said another issue the military faces in the battlefield is the timeliness of the information it receives.
“Time is critical and soldiers’ lives could be under threat without instantaneous information connectivity,” Zhang said. “When a soldier is in a remote location and their use of their information connectivity is intermittent and cannot be guaranteed, that soldier would be in danger.”
Bonneau said guaranteeing constant contact like this is vital to the military.
“It could be an injured soldier or someone needing to know where troops are in the battlefield to support them. We need to guarantee that this basic, life-critical information is communicated,” Bonneau said. “These things have to be communicated because peoples’ lives are at stake.”
Each year the Defense Sciences Office within the Department of Defense selects a number of relevant topics that researchers can apply to work on as part of the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative.
Zhang said the competition among applicants is fierce, but his group was selected because of its collaboration of ideas between professionals at different universities spanning the U.S.
“I think personally our project is very much in line with what the DOD is looking for,” he said. “We have a few top mathematicians and a few network scientists and then we have people from both electrical engineering and computer science mathematicians — it’s a healthy compilation of different expertise.”
Reach the reporter at michelle.parks@asu.edu.
