Near-Term Digital Radio

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The Near-Term Digital Radio (NTDR) program provided a prototype mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) radio system to the United States Army. The MANET protocols were provided by Bolt, Beranek and Newman; the radio hardware was supplied by ITT. 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 utilize a variant of Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) that is called ROSPF (R stands for Radio). ROSPF does not use the OSPF hello protocol for link discovery, etc. Instead, OSPF adjacencies are created and destroyed as a function of IP network information that is distributed by the NTDR routers, both cluster heads and cluster members.