Communications in congested and contested spectrum environments is challenging for today’s warfighter. TrellisWare is leading the way to enable robust communications in the presence of jammers using advanced interference mitigation techniques. Engineers from TrellisWare recently demonstrated two interference cancellation technologies to the US Army: Joint Analog and Digital Interference Cancellation (JADIC), and referenceless interference cancellation. The successful demonstrations energized the community with innovative ways on how to achieve robust communications in the presence of strong interference.

TrellisWare recently demonstrated the cancellation capability of TrellisWare’s JADIC technology as a tethered interference cancellation system that provides effective communications in the presence of powerful jammers. JADIC enables simultaneous communications and jamming operations by removing the strong jammer signal from the incoming received signal, enabling reliable communications.

The demonstration consisted of injecting a representative interference signal into the receiver path using an arbitrary waveform generator, while the TSM™ waveform running on TrellisWare’s TW-950 TSM Shadow™ radios acted as the over-the-air signal of interest. With JADIC enabled, the demo achieved reliable voice and network communications in the presence of strong interference.

The technology combines both analog and digital cancellation to provide better cancellation performance in the presence of any co-located interferer. JADIC provides > 70 dB combined analog and digital cancellation over a 30 MHz instantaneous bandwidth, and provides a vehicular solution offering reference-based cancellation (co-located with interference signal).

The future for JADIC technology is bright, as TrellisWare is leveraging the technology for Same Frequency Simultaneous Transmit and Receive (SF-STAR) capability. An SF-STAR system can nearly double the system capacity in the same bandwidth relative to a standard system.

A second, separate demonstration highlighted TrellisWare’s referenceless interference cancellation that enables reliable communication in the presence of unfriendly or friendly jamming when an interferer reference signal is not available. With referenceless cancellation, the mitigation process does not require a reference copy of the interference signal. The technology exploits signal structures to estimate and excise the interferer, enabling reliable communications. Referenceless interference cancellation enables dismounted communications near a strong interferer and provides 20-40 dB of interference cancellation.

The event highlighted the cancellation abilities of TrellisWare’s referenceless interference mitigation technique as implemented on TrellisWare’s latest and newest TSM Shadow radio communications receive signal in space processing. The setup for the demo included injecting a representative interferer signal into the signal path, between two TrellisWare TW-950 TSM Shadow radios. With the referenceless interference mitigation active, the signal was reliably received in the presence of the strong jammer.

The next steps for TrellisWare’s referenceless interference cancellation work includes full integration with TrellisWare’s Barrage Relay™ networking for use in large-scale deployments, and expansion of cancellation techniques to mitigate a wider array of interference signals.