Communications and Networks Applied Research

The goal of the Communications and Networking Program within the Office of Naval Research (ONR 311) is to support the Navy's Information Warfare vision by developing measurable advances in technology that can directly enable and enhance end-to-end connectivity and quality of-service for mission-critical information exchange among widely dispersed naval, joint, and coalition forces. The vision is to provide high throughput robust communications and networking to ensure all warfighters – from the operational command to the tactical edge – have access to information, knowledge, and decision-making necessary to perform their assigned tasks. White papers for potential FY21 Applied Research (Budget category 6.2) projects are sought under the following focus areas:
1. Advanced pointing, tracking, and stabilization approaches for mobile troposcatter communications antennas;
2. Robust uni- or bi- directional beyond line-of-sight communications using HF/VHF across a collocated and/or

geographically distributed set of antennas;
3. Novel approaches and technologies for low probability of detect/intercept communications against advanced electronic threats;
4. Innovative techniques, layered for flexible and modular SW/HW implementation, to mitigate 5G standard/protocol exploits in tactical environment operations;
5. Dynamic scheduling, routing and control mechanisms in wireless networks to efficiently and reliably deliver traffic with varying level of service requirements (e.g., latency, loss rate, priority), while resilient to uncertainty in network state awareness and imperfect coordination amongst distributed controllers; and
6. Computationally efficient, low-overhead traffic engineering and load balancing in networked wireless communications links with wide (up to 4 orders of magnitude) throughput differences.
The ONR is receptive to innovative ideas, which are not within the above focus areas, but nonetheless are important to the Navy/Marine Corps communications and networking, as otherwise described in this Topic Description.
Product Service Code:- A - RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
NAICS Code:- 541715 - Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences (except Nanotechnology and Biotechnology)
Primary point of contact:- Stephen Hughes  
Stephen.t.hughes@navy.mil
Secondary point of contact:-