Integrated Topside - integration of narrowband and wideband array antennas for shipboard communications

Abstract

The Integrated Topside (INTOP) Program is an Innovative Naval Prototype effort initiated by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to develop wideband multifunction RF system technology that will enable increased functionality through the employment of shared hardware and software resources to execute the mission objectives. An Electronic Warfare/Information Operations/Communications (EW/IO/ Comm) Advanced Development Model (ADM) is one of the prototypes being developed under the INTOP program. ONR is also developing low cost narrow band phased arrays as part of the High Throughput Networking Infrastructure (HTNI) program to support communications in the Common Data Link (CDL) frequency range. This paper explores the challenges and benefits that could be achieved through an integration of both technologies. The INTOP EW/IO/Comm program effort functionality encompasses the existing CDL spectrum with broader frequency coverage. Both the narrowband CDL array and the wideband INTOP array provide multi-beam array technology. However, the INTOP array provides greater flexibility in beam forming, interference nulling, and frequency coverage. Depending on the specific requirement for the communications link support, the CDL array set (four per ship) may provide as many as eight receive beams when used individually, or four beams when used in an elevation diversity configuration to mitigate multipath and other atmospheric effects. The INTOP receive array set (4 per ship) has the potential to support as many as 16 communication links or as few as four, when supporting the most distant communication links. As a combined asset, the receive antenna capacity addresses the Navy projections for the number of links to support Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) platforms. The transmit array is sized to similarly support the required number of links. In addition to the combined link support, the integration of the two arrays provides redundancy, multipath mitigation, frequency diversity, the potential to employ spatial separation to achieve the desired number of links within the existing frequency constraints, and the ability to allocate receive assets to enhance the frequency management of the ship to prevent interference and contention.!

Joint Radar and Communication Design: Applications, State-of-the-Art, and the Road Ahead

“…It can be readily verified that F BB is indeed a unitary matrix that satisfies the constraint in(41). Furthermore, we have…”

“…To address these problems, the Advanced Multi-function Radio Frequency Concept (AMRFC) project was launched by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2005, whose aim was to design integrated RF systems capable of simultaneously supporting multiple functions mentioned above [39], [40]. In 2009, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) sponsored a follow-up project namely the Integrated Topside (InTop) program [41], with one of its goals to further develop wideband RF components and antenna arrays for multi-function RF systems based on the outcome of AMRFC.…”

“…The enhancement of SE requires addressing the interference term in (46). It can be observed that the interference power is mainly determined by F RF F BB,2 , which is designed to approach F aux in the optimization problem (41). Hence, the choice of F aux is key to the hybrid beamforming design.…”

Low Cross-Polarization Vivaldi Arrays

“…This work develops a new class of low cross-polarization, ultra-wideband (UWB) electronically scanned arrays (ESA) to meet the needs of modern multifunctional RF systems [1], high-throughput or low-power communication systems [2][3][4], high resolution radars and sensing imagers [5][6][7][8], polarimeters and radio telescopes [9][10][11], and electronic warfare systems [12][13][14]. Although a number of accomplished UWB-ESAs have been proposed over the past decades [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] Most high-efficiency (low-loss) UWB-ESA apertures, certainly those that archive BWRs wider than 6:1 such as the Vivaldi array [24], are subject to an inherent bandwidth versus cross-polarization trade-off.…”

“…Aside from these innate advantages, the wide bandwidth of a UWB-ESA further benefits these systems by enabling increased throughput communications [2,3] in addition to low-power wideband transmission [4]. This can be seen upon considering the capacity of a communication channel, i.e.…”