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News and New Products
US military to adopt mobile base-station technology
By Jeff Berman -- EDN, 6/30/2005
Software-defined-radio vendor Vanu Inc recently demonstrated a prototype of a mobile GSM (global-system-for-mobile-communications) cellular base station, which the company based on its proprietary Anywave all-software GSM base station (Picture). The devices targets the base station for use at the US Army base at Fort Dix, NJ. The army used Vanu’s Anywave with satellite-backhaul technology from Globalstar (www.globalstar.com) to ensure that communications systems were in place and functional while military vehicles were moving. Vanu received a development contract in June 2004 from the US Army CERDEC (Communications Electronics Command Research, Development, and Engineering Center (www.monmouth.army.mil/cecom/rdec/about.htm) to develop the technology.
During the demonstration period, Vanu mounted the devices and other equipment onto Humvees. The equipment comprised three GSM networks, each integrating a prototype Anywave GSM cellular base station, a Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com) 2.0 NEBS (Network Equipment Building Standards)-compliant server, and a Globalstar satellite. This deployment, according to Alok Shah, Vanu’s director of product management, helped each Humvee unit function achieve communications in localized areas, even if they lacked communication with the rest of the world. “The luxury of [employing call-connecting devices] in case satellite connections were down was not an option,” says Shah.
A basic mobile switching center technology in Anywave handles call-control functions and register handsets. The Globalstar satellite links enable the units to call one another through audio feeds and control signaling. If a satellite is unavailable, two users near one Humvee can still communicate over a network without an available satellite link. One Globalstar satellite link supports communications for a moving vehicle and as many as 30 Type 1 secure headsets within a three- to five-mile range. These satellite links need not point in a specific direction to connect with a satellite, unlike the standard-cell macro deployments that the military commonly uses.
The size, weight, and power of these systems are critical because the Humvees have limited space for extra equipment. “Typically, a system made up of off-the-shelf components could not fit into a Humvee,” says Shah. “We will work on shrinking [these components] in future demonstrations and deployments. By compressing the backhaul to get information sent to the same links, we could work with smaller form factors and limited bandwidth.”
John Winn, Vanu’s vice president for sales and marketing, says that the company will increase its focus on ruggedizing the system for harsh environments and offer systems in different frequency ranges, with an eye on integrating a 900-MHz front end for in-building penetration.
Vanu Inc, www.vanu.com.
