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March 11, 2009
Elektrobit to Help Develop SDR for Public Safety Communications
TMCnet Contributor
Electrobit Corporation reportedly announced that it is collaborating with five other companies to develop a common software-defined radio architecture for the European Union’s so-called “Defense and Public Safety Communications” initiative.
The six companies – EB from Finland, Indra from Spain, Radmor from Poland, Saab from Sweden, Selex from Italy and Thales from France – collectively form the European Secure Software Defined Radio program, a European Defense Agency project.
ESSOR was formed to overcome the interaction and response time problems created by existing different communications technologies used by EU member states and service providers including type of equipment, applications and user system requisites. The problem gets exacerbated when cross-border emergency appeals or alerts are made during terror attacks, natural calamities, disasters in general and any effort that calls for humanitarian and defense assistance.
In addition, new technology costs, limited individual state budgets, the small size and population of some states were making it difficult for equipment manufacturers to match demands. So it was decided to work primarily with a common software driven platform to deliver an instant, flexible and simultaneous multi directional wireless communications system. Since fighting terror and defense requirements are on the rise the system required extensibility built-in from grass-root levels.
ESSOR is scheduled for completion by end 2012 at a budgeted cost estimate of approximately $127 million. SDR basically attempts, and mostly succeeds, to replace all hardware components of a traditional radio communication system such as detectors, transmitting stations, modulators, demodulators, filters, and amplifiers with software driven functions via computers or other processor based computing equipment.
EB has a history of delivering communications solutions for defense and public safety all over the world, and has expertise in testing, validation, certification of waveform portability and platform re-configurability that are critical in any SDR technology.
"By integrating a common communications framework based on software defined radios, the European Defense Agency will enable a more efficient technology cross-utilization between global defense domains, resulting in cost savings and increased innovation," said Ari Virtanen, executive vice president of Wireless Solutions at EB.
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Vivek Naik is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Vivek's articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Michael Dinan