Goals and challenges of the DARPA GloMo program [global mobile information systems]

Continuing advances in high-speed computation, signal processing, and miniaturization are opening up new opportunities for advancing the state of the art in mobile, wireless, multimedia information systems technologies. Such technologies are critical to meeting the defense requirements for rapidly deployable and robust information systems. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated the Global Mobile Information Systems (GloMo) program in 1994 to develop and demonstrate technologies to support these requirements. The GloMo program leverages and integrates several previous related DARPA programs. It is a "vertically integrated" program, dealing with issues ranging from underlying radio and signal processing technology through middleware to support of mobile applications. The GloMo program supports a number of research projects at various organizations, with the scope of the projects ranging from concept development to demonstration of prototype systems. The GloMo research community is collaborating to link the individual research efforts within these diverse activities, collectively demonstrating major technological advances through a distributed digital wireless communications testbed being developed under the program. Such advances will be leveraged and demonstrated in specific user scenarios of interest in defense applications. The technologies developed are intended to serve as catalysts for new commercial wireless information systems and services, thereby making the technology accessible to the military through commercial products and services.