Raytheon unit moves to Phase 2 of DARPA net upgrades

Raytheon Co. subsidiary BBN Technologies has been awarded a $16 million Defense Department contract to create architectures, protocols and network devices that will improve network capabilities and integrity for tactical military units.

Under the award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, BBN Technologies will work on the second phase of the Military Networking Protocol program to enhance network security and performance, according to a Raytheon announcement dated July 13.

The program's suite of security techniques will ensure that the network is limited to authorized users and is extremely difficult to spoof or to introduce false traffic.

With the ability to clearly identify individual aspects of network traffic, unit commanders will be able to adapt and reassign network resources as dictated by constantly changing tactical situations to the correct individuals and units.

In the previous phase of the program, the BBN team developed and successfully demonstrated the network technology in a test environment using 200 network devices at a data transmission speed of 100 Mbps.

The team is currently working toward the goal of a networked environment scaled to 10,000 devices working at speeds up to 100 times faster.

Raytheon Co., of Waltham, Mass., ranks No. 4 on Washington Technology’s 2011 Top 100 list of the largest federal government contractors.