Baseband Diversity Product (BDP) RFI for Protected SATCOM Demonstration Project

REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI) Baseband Diversity Product (BDP) RFI for Protected SATCOM Demonstration Project This request for information (RFI) is for planning purposes only and shall not be considered as an invitation for bid, request for quotation (RFQ), request for proposal (RFP), or as an obligation on the part of the Government to acquire any products or services. Your response to this RFI will be treated as information only. No entitlement to payment of direct or indirect costs or charges by the Government will arise as a result of contractor submission of responses to this announcement or the Government use of such information. This request does not constitute a solicitation for proposals or the authority to enter into negotiations to award a contract. No funds have been authorized, appropriated, or received for this effort. This information is being requested as part of our market research to assist in the development of future specifications. The information provided may be used by the Army in developing its acquisition strategy and statements of work/ objectives. Interested parties are responsible for adequately marking proprietary or competition sensitive information contained in their response. The Government does not intend to award a contract on the basis of this RFI or to otherwise pay for the information submitted in response to this RFI. Introduction: CERDEC S&TCD is currently researching technologies to complement current modem and payload efforts to provide additional protection in Wideband Satellite Communications. The Protected SATCOM Demonstration Project proposes to use diversity inspired protection technologies to address four areas or SATCOM capability attributes; Protection, Connectivity, Availability, and Operational Management. The protection attribute concerns capabilities that would enable the user to maintain and achieve mission objectives in the face of malicious jamming, cyber, kinetic and nuclear threats while at the same time offering some indemnity against signal detection and interception. Connectivity and Availability are to be considered. Operational Management addresses Management and Control (M&C) and the issues related to improved systems integration. These could include features such as adaptive/dynamic control and performance optimization in a changing environment, leveraging both Situational Awareness (SA) and M&C technologies. The basic principle behind the Diversity concept is that a signal transmitted and received over statistically independent channels experience differing channel conditions and can be reconstructed in manner to mitigate the deleterious effects of the changes occurring in the channels by employing creative processing techniques on one or both ends of the channel. The impacts of these changes would not be identical, or simultaneously occurring, on the independent channels/branches. We are considering, among other possible diversity methods; multiple satellites, frequencies and frequency bands, beams, polarizations, and multiple media e.g. SATCOM and Terrestrial (fiber and/or microwave). The goal is to resolve the signal over independent channel paths to mitigate the effects of interference or jamming and increase link robustness. The Government is interested in exploring options that would offer the most flexibility to operate in a contested environment to maintain connectivity, improve link availability, reliability, and resilience, while at the same time confounding adversarial attempts to intercept and/or detect the communications signal. Diversity has been identified as an approach to implementing Protection in Enterprise Wideband SATCOM Ground Terminals and Army Tactical Ground Terminals, which would be complimentary to other protection techniques. The Government (US Army CERDEC) is seeking to determine the availability and technical capabilities of Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Baseband Diversity Products (BDPs), and is interested in receiving information for the design, development, delivery, and demonstration of similar or related products that are capable of providing and managing multiple paths for satellite communications in benign and contested environments. The BDP devices should be capable of supporting multiple network topologies for high speed data, voice, and video communications over terrestrial and satellite networks. The BDP devices should also be capable of processing multiple streams simultaneously, and interfacing with multiple modems, and modem types (both commercial and military modems) support improved Anti-Jamming (AJ) performance, and ease of integration. The BDP should support control and management functionalities in real-time to monitor network performance, and use historical data to predict network behavior and support operations. Scope: The Government is developing the architecture for the next generation Wideband Control SATCOM system to help improve AJ performance and interference mitigation along with Low Probability Interception (LPI) and Low Probability Detection (LPD) for Wideband SATCOM. Part of the effort is to identify commercial solutions for baseband traffic switching capability in the near term, within the context of network capabilities, for the Enterprise Systems to support strategic to strategic terminal communications (i.e. Teleport to Teleport, Teleport to RHN, and Teleport to other strategic terminal), and strategic to tactical terminal communications (i.e. Teleport/RHN Hub to tactical deployed forces terminal). It is envisioned that the BDP will be inserted in the architecture between the convergent router and satellite modems. Key areas of interest for the BDP device include technology maturity, cost, link overhead requirements, architectures supported, and features. A tactical version of the device will also be required, hence Unit Production Cost, Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) consumption are of critical importance. The BDP should be designed for easy integration into enterprise and tactical terminals supporting multiple diversity methods and CONOPS. Table 1 lists the key system functionalities to be supported by the BDP. The Threshold (T) denotes the minimum acceptable functional requirements and Objective (O) denotes the desired target requirements. **See Attachment for Table 1** Evaluation and Administration by Federal and non - Federal Personnel Government civil servant employees are subject to the non - disclosure obligations of a felony criminal statute, the Trade Secrets Act, 18 USC 1905. The Government may seek the advice of qualified non - Federal personnel. The Government may also use non - Federal personnel to conduct routine, nondiscretionary administrative activities. The respondents, by submitting its response, consent to the government providing their response to non - Federal parties. Non - Federal parties given access to responses must be subject to an appropriate obligation of confidentiality prior to being given the access. Submissions may be reviewed by support contractors and private consultants. For any technical clarifications or questions regarding reference documents or RFI, contact: Technical POCs Minh Nguyen (443) 395-9639 Minh.d.nguyen25.civ@mail.mil Rich Hoffmann (443) 395-9637 paul.r.hoffmann4.civ@mail.mil For any other clarifications or questions regarding reference documents or RFI, contact: Primary Contact: James Greer Contract Specialist (443) 861-4622 james.a.greer.civ@mail.mil Secondary Contact David Greaves Contract Officer (443)861-4648 david.a.greaves4.civ@mail.mil The information received will not obligate the Government in any manner nor will the Government reimburse contractors for any costs associated with submittal of the requested information. This request does not constitute an Invitation for Bid or a Request for Proposal Responses to this RFI. Responses to this RFI shall be submitted, via e-mail, no later than 14 September 2015 8:00AM Eastern Standard Time (EST) directly to the following e-mail address: james.a.greer.civ@mail.mil. No extensions will be granted to the submission date. Please limit responses to 30 pages (excluding the cover page and table of contents) and utilizing Times New Roman, 12 point font. Proprietary information should be clearly marked. Respondents should identify their company's name, address, telephone number, point of contact, and whether they are a large or small business.