DARPA wants to build 100Gbps wireless military network

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has launched a program to create technology that can act as a backbone for an airborne network with the same sort of bandwidth as fiber optic backbones—100 gigabits per second.

The project is called 100 Gb/s RF Backbone or 100G for short. The goal project is to provide the US military with networks needing no wires that are about 500 times faster than the current wireless links used. The project is seeking to give soldiers in the field fast connectivity with high bandwidth and low latency you might expect from a fiber-optic network.

"Providing fiber-optic-equivalent capacity on a radio frequency carrier will require spectrally efficient use of available RF spectrum," Dick Ridgway, DARPA program manager, said in a statement. "100G plans to demonstrate how high-order modulation and spatial multiplexing can be synergistically combined to achieve 100 Gigabits per second with the size, weight and power needed for a deployable system. We believe that to achieve the program's goals requires the convergence of telecommunications system providers and the defense communications tech base."

Currently, the military uses a standard known as the Tactical Common Data Link (TCDL) for secure communication of heavy data. However, TCDL is relatively slow, maxing out at about 10.7 Mbps at 125 miles, according to the Federation of American Scientists. Most consumer handsets today get better data rates via LTE.

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