MARLBOROUGH, Mass. -- Raytheon Company has been awarded a contract by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to provide a cost-effective, highly capable military wireless network interoperable gateway.

The contract provides Raytheon $24.4 million for one year. Options would extend the contract to 2012 and bring the potential value to $155 million.

The Mobile Ad-Hoc Interoperability GATEway, or MAINGATE, will integrate any combination of heterogeneous military, civil or coalition radios into a single network to facilitate communication among disparate systems.

"Our MAINGATE solution enables legacy analog and digital communication systems to be networked. It includes an affordable, two-channel, high data rate, next- generation network-centric radio system," said Jerry Powlen, vice president, Network Centric Systems Integrated Communications Systems. "We continue to build on our Internet Protocol-based networking experience to deliver the most advanced systems to our troops at a much lower cost than other systems in development today."

The unique architecture of the MAINGATE system overcomes the limits of most networking systems in use today. It allows for many more users to join the network at the same time and enables more than 30 different military and civil radios to communicate with one another while concurrently providing a high-capacity, mobile network.

One of the key technologies used in the system's development is Raytheon's Mobile Ad-Hoc Networking protocols. These MANET protocols enable the MAINGATE system to be mobile, allow nodes to join or leave the network and scale to a very large numbers of systems.

Other technologies incorporated into the MAINGATE system include disruption-tolerant networking, which is designed to overcome disruptions inherent in wireless, line-of-sight communications systems; dynamic spectrum access to establish and maintain communication in congested radio frequency or noisy environments; and multi-input, multi-output technology to improve performance in urban environments.

Raytheon Company, with 2008 sales of $23.2 billion, is a technology and innovation leader specializing in defense, homeland security and other government markets throughout the world. With a history of innovation spanning 87 years, Raytheon provides state-of-the-art electronics, mission systems integration and other capabilities in the areas of sensing; effects; and command, control, communications and intelligence systems, as well as a broad range of mission support services. With headquarters in Waltham, Mass., Raytheon employs 73,000 people worldwide.

Internet Protocol is the standard method by which data is sent from one endpoint to another using the Internet.

Mobile ad-hoc networking protocols are software-defined algorithms used to route data in a highly mobile, wireless communication network without a fixed infrastructure. Work is underway to incorporate the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's dynamic spectrum access techniques for additional flexibility and capability.

Dynamic spectrum access is a technique that monitors, adapts and uses frequency resources depending on current usage, closely following rules and guidelines established for sharing resources.

Raytheon
18.07.2009