Communications and Networking Technology

The summary for the Communications and Networking Technology grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the Office of Naval Research, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

Communications and Networking Technology: Communications technology that can provide seamless, robust, connectivity is at the foundation of the Sea Power 21 and FORCEnet Vision "... to have the right information, at the right place, at the right time ..." The performance of Command and Control (C2) systems and decision making at all levels of command depend critically on reliable, interoperable, survivable, secure and timely communications and networking, and the availability of high capacity multimedia (voice, data, imagery) communication networks is fundamental to nearly all Department of Navy missions. The current evolution of naval warfighting from a platform-centric to a network-centric paradigm depends on successfully meeting the implied need for significantly enhanced communications and networking capabilities, extending both to fixed shore facilities and to highly mobile air, surface, land and subsurface platforms, including the so-called "disadvantaged user", e.g., small-deck combatants, submarines, unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), dispersed ground units in radio frequency (RF) challenged environments, etc. The goal of the Communications and Networking Program within the Office of Naval Research (ONR 312) is to support the FORCEnet vision by developing measurable advances in technology that can directly enable and enhance mission-critical connectivity among such widely dispersed naval, joint, allied and coalition forces. With an overarching emphasis on wireless terrestrial, maritime and satellite communications and networking, ONR 312 is seeking white papers for potential FY 08 Exploratory Development/Applied Research (Budget category 6.2) projects under the following focus area: Electrically small and light weight antenna technologies in the ELF/VLF (100 Hz-10 KHz) band for subsurface to surface/aerial communications. Higher radiating efficiency is required, for example, to maintain adequate Signal-to-Noise ratio in a UAV to submarine communications link, due to SWaP (size, weight and power) constraints in the tactical edge. Technologies and approaches may include, amongst others, metamaterials, active circuitry, ATL (artificial transmission line), new geometries and volumetric designs. ONR is also receptive to highly innovative ideas in other general communications and networking areas that is not designated focus as above, but nevertheless important to Navy/Marine Corps, such as the following (these are not in any priority order): (i) Advanced modulation, coding, equalization, co-site interference mitigation, and power amplification to improve mobile wireless link performance, bandwidth efficiency and spectral containment, while reducing form-factor and energy consumption; (ii) Cognitive radios and agile frequency communications, bandwidth management; (iii) Tactical Common Data Link (TCDL) spectral efficiency improvement to Gbps operation and TCDL multipath mitigation; (iv) Fundamental issues in tactical edge MANET (Mobile Ad-hoc NETworking) involving algorithms/protocols/policies for highly efficient routing, rapid self-configuration and self organization within and across heterogeneous radio sub-nets (platform speeds up to high supersonic); (v) Robust, highly agile, networked UAVs C3 (Communications, Computation and Control) using technologies as autonomic middleware and intelligent agents. The emphasis here is on real-time collaboration between control data plane on distributed C2 platforms to meet UAV flight dynamics and missions, while simultaneously facilitating high data rate ISR (Information, Surveillance Reconnaissance) relay via directional antennas. Please see Amendment No. 04 attached under "Attachments."