SPECIAL FEATURE
Accelerating Delivery of New Electronic Warfare Capabilities with COTS Software Defined Radios By Jeremy Twaits , Solutions Marketing Manager, NI’s Aerospace
Spectrum superiority has never been more critical to success on the battlefield. Amid an increasingly contested and congested electromagnetic spectrum, the ability to reliably operate communications and navigation systems while deceiving and disrupting the adversary creates a significant tactical advantage. Software defined radio (SDR) provides the ideal platform for developing and deploying electronic warfare systems and the flexibility to adapt to modern and constantly evolving threats.
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COTS Journal | June 2022
After a hiatus on travel, the recent Association of Old Crows’ (AOC) annual European summit in Montpellier, France, was the ideal spot for garnering insight into the most pervasive drivers in the development of novel EW (electronic warfare) capabilities. The AOC Europe conference proved a melting pot of old faces and new technologies. Immediately obvious was the value of rapid innovation inspired by COTS tools – from the influence of EW in ongoing conflict, to the rising tide of digital engineering, to the growing need for cognitive techniques. The Timeliness and Importance of EW A recurring theme at the AOC Europe conference was the conflict in Ukraine, highlighting the timely requirement for novel capabilities for both disrupting an adversary’s use of the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) and protecting communications and other assets from being denied spectrum access. It is clear why advanced EM techniques are required as a protective measure against an ensuing threat. It has been widely reported that, in 2022, Ukrainian forces have operated more effectively in the electromagnetic spectrum battlefield than in Russian incursions into Eastern Ukraine in 2014 and 2015. This has been attributed in part to new, more jammingresistant, radios deployed by Ukrainian forces and has contributed to Ukraine avoiding the fog of war that Russia would surely have liked them to flounder within. Additionally, Ukraine has been successful at not only jamming Russian EM devices, but even capturing EW systems – providing vital intelligence on Russia’s capabilities. The game of electromagnetic cat-and-mouse continues relentlessly, and concluding definitive winners and losers in the EMS stands to be difficult or impossible. However, achieving domination of the electromagnetic spectrum is a key contributor to mission success, and forms the backbone to
the further trends discussed. If You’re Going to Fail, Fail Fast A key part of delivering new EW capabilities stems from flexibility to test new ideas quickly, and to fail fast. Spending time on mocking up boards or designing custom ASICs may be wasted if the concept under research does not yield improvements over existing algorithms, waveforms, or architectures. A key area of focus on new capabilities revolves around cognitive techniques, and questions on how to prototype and assess them. Cognitive radar and EW systems aim to minimize the load on human decision-making. Let’s take radar for example: Rather than an operator making decisions on operating frequencies, pulse widths, modulation types and so on, a knowledge-aided processer takes input from the receive chain and an environmental database and runs an algorithm to estimate the optimal pulse rate and modulation type for detecting and identifying objects in the radar field of view. The use of cognitive systems intends to drastically reduce the time needed to identify ideal operating parameters. Whether for cognitive jamming or artificial intelligence / machine learning based receivers, the ability to acquire RF data, process it and make decisions on a processing unit is key. Software defined radios can enable prototyping of cognitive techniques by utilising FPGAs onboard for real-time signal processing, and even offloading tasks to other computing units such as CPUs or GPUs. NI incorporates these processing options into a freely available, open-source reference architecture for rapidly developing a prototyping testbed for EM techniques. This Open Architecture for Radar and EW Research (OARER) is a validated design pattern with assembly instructions,
