CAMBRIDGE, Mass., 7 Dec. 2005. BBN Technologies announced today that it has been awarded a contract with a value of up to $11 million over the next three years by the Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under its Adaptive Cognition-Enhanced Radio Teams (ACERT) program.
Under the program, BBN will lead a world-class, interdisciplinary team that will develop open source software to improve wireless connectivity and performance in unpredictable urban environments.
To accomplish this, BBN and its team members will integrate cognitive algorithms in an open-source platform that will increase radio team functionality by allowing radios to adapt to network changes in real time. In addition to enabling better communications performance, the program will contribute enhanced software to the open source community.
BBN's partners include:
* the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kan.
* MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
* UCLA, Los Angeles, Calif., and
* Blossom Research, Reno, Nev.
Recent events have illustrated the need for communications systems that do not rely on fixed infrastructure but that can dynamically assemble the required components to create the needed communications environment. The software radios developed under ACERT will enable adaptation to provide communications under challenging conditions.
"The goals of DARPA's ACERT program are ambitious," said Tad Elmer, president and CEO of BBN Technologies. "BBN intends to deliver 10 years of progress in three years. To this end we've assembled a terrific team of world leaders in wireless, cognitive, and distributed systems to meet the challenge and design a reliable, composable communication system."
BBN Technologies has a long history of success in the development of data communications radio software and protocols. Since leading innovations in packet radio research in the mid 1970s, BBN has continued to make major contributions, including developing routing protocols for the first directional wireless ad hoc network and significant contributions to Near Term Digital Radio (NTDR) and Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS), energy-efficient sensor networks, and policy-based radio operation. In fact, every deployed military ad hoc network in North America and Europe relies on BBN software.
"BBN's work under the DARPA ACERT program will result in open source software for radio teams-software that anyone can use, modify, and redistribute," said Greg Troxel, division scientist at BBN Technologies. "Our work will radically advance the state of the art for teams of software radios that learn about their environment, helping to ensure reliable communications in challenging environments."
BBN Technologies, an advanced technology and research and development firm, is focused on solving some of the world's most pressing problems. From national security, information security, and speech recognition, to integrating disparate systems and networks, BBN has been at the forefront of technological change for over 50 years.
Known for pioneering the development of the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, BBN continues to create advances in Internet and networking technologies through its work on ad hoc networking, the semantic web, quantum communications, and advanced protocols. Building on its substantial list of firsts, BBN operates the first metro quantum cryptography network, the first real-time foreign broadcast monitoring system, and has developed the world's first stereoscopic digital mammography system. For more information, see www.bbn.com.
