Soldier Phone: an innovative approach to wireless multimedia communications

A number of tactical military and commercial applications require multimedia, self-organizing, high throughput, wireless networks that can operate independently of fixed or external infrastructures. These uses range from low echelon push-to-talk radio to higher echelon subscriber access to MSE, and include commercial applications such as wireless LANs and emergency communications. The Soldier Phone system addresses these needs with an innovative concept termed orthogonal domain multiple access (ODMA) to provide dynamic bandwidth management. It adjusts radio transmit and receive times, channels, and data rates to match the dynamic radio frequency (RF) environment and user traffic loading. ODMA is embedded in a larger suite of protocols that manage the peer-to-peer communications. These include ATM style switching for datagrams and virtual circuits; network management for routing, signaling, and address resolution; and user convergence for many traffic types. This protocol suite has been integrated with baseband digital signal processing (DSP) functions to yield a wireless networking engine (WNE). Soldier Phone is the first instantiation of the WNE and has been successfully demonstrated in a laboratory testbed.