Engineering:Near-term digital radio

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NTDR nodes being prepared for trials, February 1998.
Initial, large-scale trials of the NTDR network, February 1998.

The Near-term digital radio (NTDR) program provided a prototype mobile ad hoc network (MANET) radio system to the United States Army, starting in the 1990s. The MANET protocols were provided by Bolt, Beranek and Newman; the radio hardware was supplied by ITT.[1] These systems have been fielded by the United Kingdom as the High-capacity data radio (HCDR) and by the Israelis as the Israeli data radio. They have also been purchased by a number of other countries for experimentation.

The NTDR protocols consist of two components: clustering and routing. The clustering algorithms dynamically organize a given network into cluster heads and cluster members. The cluster heads create a backbone; the cluster members use the services of this backbone to send and receive packets. The cluster heads use a link-state routing algorithm to maintain the integrity of their backbone and to track the locations of cluster members.

The NTDR routers also use a variant of Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) that is called Radio-OSPF (ROSPF). ROSPF does not use the OSPF hello protocol for link discovery, etc. Instead, OSPF adjacencies are created and destroyed as a function of MANET information that is distributed by the NTDR routers, both cluster heads and cluster members. It also supported multicasting.[2]

References

  1. L. Williams, L. Emory, "Near Term Digital Radio - a first look", Proceedings of the 1996 Tactical Communications Conference. Ensuring Joint Force Superiority in the Information Age, 30 April-2 May 1996.
  2. B. Welsh, N. Rehn, B. Vincent, J. Weinstein, and S. Wood, "Multicasting with the near term digital radio (NTDR) in the Tactical Internet", IEEE Military Communications Conference Proceedings, MILCOM 98, 19-21 Oct. 1998.