Army Awards Mayflower SBIR Phase II Contract to Develop Energy-efficient Soldier Radio Technology

The objective of this Army-funded program is to design and build a micro-MIMO radio that is energy-efficient, and to apply this technology to JTRS Cluster 5 and other Army tactical radios.

Mayflower’s MEADoWS (MIMO for Energy-Aware Distributed Mobile Wireless Systems) technology is an energy-efficient and spectrally-efficient Multi Input Multi Output (MIMO)-based radio. The MEADoWS system builds on Mayflower’s proven technology in MIMO antenna signal processing. The soldier’s requirements in future wireless mobile communication systems are very demanding on Size, Weight, and Power (SWAP); the power (energy) is the most critical of the three, as it often determines the size and weight. The proposed MEADoWS system innovations directly address this critical need for power reduction in soldiers’ radio by means of an energy-efficient MIMO physical layer, a cognitive MAC layer, and a collaborative network layer. The energy-efficient physical, MAC, and network layers of the MEADoWS system target different sources of energy consumption, leading to significant gains in energy-efficiency. The Phase I feasibility study demonstrated that MEADoWS meets the Army objectives of energy efficiency and applicability to JTRS Cluster 5. In the Phase II program, we will build a prototype MEADoWS and demonstrate its functionality in a test bed, with multiple MEADoWS units participating in the demonstration. In Phase III, we will transfer the MEADoWS technology to the General Dynamics (GD) JTRS Cluster 5 soldier radio.

In this era of untethered computing, wireless communications is ubiquitous: computers have Wi-Fi, consumer electronics have Bluetooth, and sensing and RF tracking technologies have Zigbee, to name just three of the numerous current and future wireless standards. This brings up two resource issues: (1) Spectrum (wireless spectrum is limited, so the devices need to be spectrally-efficient) (2) Energy (energy, provided by a battery, is limited, so the devices need to be energy-efficient). Our solution, based on MIMO, provides energy-efficient and spectrally-efficient communications. A military application of MEADoWS is the DoD JTRS Cluster 5 radio for the soldier.