Persistent Systems the week of Aug. 12 unveils the GEN4 (MPU4) radio for its family of Wave-Relay® devices that provide mobile networking to wirelessly allow nodes on a network to self-form and self-heal, which means, for example, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) can become an entity on the network, compared to having to transmit to a receiver on a ground station, company officials said ahead of participating in AUVSI Unmanned Systems 2013 in Washington, D.C.
The Gen4 (MPU4) is a compact radio that can be installed in avionics bays, vehicles, machinery and other third party systems or used in user-worn applications, the company said. Seamless Layer-2 Ethernet connectivity facilitates plug-and-play operation of cameras, video encoders, IP sensors, and other devices.
Wave Relay creates a rapidly converging network that provides seamless connectivity to each transceiver node on land, sea or in the air even in the worst conditions. The company research and development team has designed wireless networking protocols to support their cutting edge Wave Relay system and technology.
“Instead of a person flying the UAV or with a remote ground control, anyone in the network with a Wave-Relay device and send and receive information, pull information from the net and control it from multiple places,” Adrien Robenhymer, vice president of Business Development and Marketing at Persistent Systems said in an interview. “It allows end users more functions.”
In another example, he said after Hurricane Sandy, a private network was created in a few hours and provided network connectivity for first responders from New York City to Staten Island.
It’s a true mobile ad hoc network, Robenhymer said. “There are no restrictions on the number of hops in the network, no maximum number of nodes–it’s designed for mobility…Also, there are no central points of failure.”
The demonstration shows the network hopping through multiple aircraft feeds back to a single ground point, Robenhymer said. The interesting thing is that is opens up a whole new concept of operations. If a UAV is flying in mountainous terrain and can’t send its data or video to the other side of the mountain, the feed finds another way to go. “Such unique features really allow assets to now go where they couldn’t go before.”
Robenhymer said it is one of the company’s discriminator’s that it is a full network. “Our core capabilities are in networking of these radios” as a mobile ad hoc network.
This technology is widely adopted throughout the military, oil and gas, mining and agriculture and commercial areas for machine to machine communications. It makes it possible to synchronize diagnostics between vehicles, coordinate among vehicles across vast distances. In agriculture, for example, across large acreages where no connectivity existed, now there is the ability to have a private network, to share video, know where systems are and understand the maintenance health of large vehicles.
Mitchell said their wave relay products are not ITAR restricted, so NATO could use them as well as commercial entities. “I like to call it the “Swiss Army Knife” of radios,” he said.
The company also is unique, Mitchell said, in that it manufacturing its innovative products in the middle of Manhattan–one of the most intense RF environments in the world.
At AUVSI Persistent Systems showcases Wave Relay®; the mobile ad-hoc networking (MANET) solution; wireless secure scalable communications; high throughput, low latency, peer to peer routing; aircraft MANET networks at extended ranges; ground robots using MANET in caves and building; and discuss unmanned air, ground, and surface MANET use cases.