Raytheon won a $24.4 million contract with the U.S. military to develop a technology called MAINGATE, or Mobile Ad hoc Interperability GATEway, that will link several tactical ground, air and satellite communications terminals together as a key piece of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project.
The wireless IP network project has been going on within the Department of Defense for about a decade but MAINGATE will bring in groups of radios and integrate them onto one high latency wireless network. The aim of the program is to enable tactical, real-time, high-quality video, data and voice to be deployed in a networked environment to support tactical operations.
Raytheon's MAINGATE will allow legacy analog and digital systems to be networked together. It will allow a host of users to join the network at the same time as well as allow more than 30 different military and civil radios to talk to each other while maintaining a high-capacity mobile network. For instance, the network must support a minimum of 20 simultaneous 384 kbps video streams, voice and data applications, peer-to-peer applications and network management for aggregate per link data rates ranging from 6.5 Mbps up to 100 Mbps.
For more:
- see Network World