U.S. Air Force awards Cubic HW/SW contract to support comms backbone
NewsMarch 22, 2023
SAN DIEGO. Cubic Mission and Performance Solutions (CMPS) won a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract from the U.S. Air Force (USAF) Research & Development (R&D) program for Halo-Enabled Resilient Mesh (HERMes) software and a hardware prototype, both of which are intended to boost the technological capabilities of the U.S. Air Force (USAF) high-capacity backbone (HCB).
The Halo capability, according to the CMPS announcement, facilitates a high-bandwidth, resilient, ad hoc multilink mesh network for the USAF using novel digital beamforming techniques.
Under the terms of the Air Force contract, Halo will investigate, design, develop, test, and demonstrate the capabilities of the HERMes system. It also calls for Cubic to expand the HCB communication system’s technical capabilities -- including such moves as developing the hardware used for the solution -- in order to increase the range of operating frequencies and enable code and algorithm optimization. It is also intended to accommodate research into alternative capabilities to augment both the type and number of operational platforms.
