BBN Technologies, an advanced technology solutions firm, announced today it has been awarded $10.8 million in funding by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the Wireless Adaptive Network Development (WAND) program, in a contract awarded by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). As prime contractor on the program, BBN will lead a team that includes Shared Spectrum Corporation; SPARTA; the University of Pennsylvania; Virginia Tech; University of California, Santa Cruz; Palo Alto Research Center; and Agile Communications.

The WAND effort provides the networking technology for the DARPA Wireless Network after Next (WNaN) program, which is developing the technology for a deployable military communications infrastructure. The goal of the WAND program is to design and develop the network technologies necessary to establish ultra-large (tens of thousands of nodes), highly scalable, highly adaptive, ad hoc networks that provide robust networking across densely connected deployments of inexpensive wireless nodes. The vision is that WAND-enabled networks will adapt to changing conditions and mission requirements by adjusting the topology of the network and the operational mode of wireless nodes to create and maintain a rich, multiply-connected network that provides superior communications at lower cost and with enhanced survivability. Previous practice has been to organize networks around sparsely deployed, expensive nodes; WAND represents a fundamental shift in the design approach to tactical military networks from designing for radio range to designing for node density.

BBN’s innovations for the WAND network will include incorporating opportunistic spectrum access, policy and reasoning based techniques, a multi-channel multi-frequency radio, adaptive MIMO modulation to improve performance in urban environments, and content-based routing and access. The network will be implemented on inexpensive radios so that it can be deployed affordably throughout the armed services.

Tad Elmer, president and CEO, BBN Technologies, said, "This contract award confirms BBN’s leadership position in advanced networking. Our unparalleled expertise in this area will assure that DARPA gets a superior communications network that meets the program’s ambitious goals."

About BBN Technologies
BBN Technologies solves real problems through the creation and disciplined application of advanced technology. With expertise spanning information security, speech and language processing, networking, distributed systems, and sensing and control systems, BBN scientists and engineers have amassed a substantial collection of innovations and patented solutions. Today, BBN is managing the planning and design of GENI, an advanced network facility spanning the United States; is saving lives in Iraq and Afghanistan with its Boomerang Shooter Detection System; operates the first metro quantum cryptography network; has deployed the first real-time foreign broadcast monitoring system; and is proving the benefits of the world's first stereoscopic digital mammography system in clinical trials. For more information, visit www.bbn.com.