[SatNews] As a major stakeholder in keeping the United States at the leading edge of technology, the Department of Defense leans on the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs to stimulate innovation among entrepreneurial companies and research institutions.

Through a staged program that encourages and rewards the maturing of nascent concepts, the government provides funding nurturance and a degree of partnership to evolve new technologies that hold promise of bolstering military advantage, improving security, reducing costs, saving lives, or perhaps reducing environmental impacts. The brass ring for the DoD and contractors involved in the SBIR program is to advance successfully from a phase I feasibility study, through phase II concept/prototype, to a SBIR phase III, whereby the product or service is deemed mature enough to be commercially viable. This is the win-win outcome that the SBIR/STTR program was created to produce, but in practice, advancing new science and technology concepts to an "acquisition-ready" state is challenging. The total number of SBIR grants that progress to phase III each year is in the low single digits.

On April 1, 2011, the Joint Program Executive Office, Joint Tactical Radio System (JPEO JTRS) announced a phase III contract award to Scalable Network Technologies, Inc. (SNT), Los Angeles, CA. The $11M contract is for a product called JNE (JTRS Network Emulator) to be used by numerous DoD programs/agencies. From a field of more than 80 SBIR grants in the JTRS program alone, SNT is the first phase III contract recipient. JNE is a virtual laboratory that supports real-time emulation of large-scale communication networks of current and future force radios and associated waveforms. Based on SNT's EXata™ emulation engine, JNE is used to create "hybrid" networks that can emulate the intensity and distribution of traffic typical of battlefield deployments, and perform with all the complexity and realism of an actual large-scale network. This high degree of fidelity makes it possible to integrate a JNE network into live exercises using real hardware, real users and real applications connected to operational networks.

JNE's importance as an urgent capability player in the Army's upcoming series of brigade-level network integration operational test exercises at Fort Bliss, TX and White Sands Missile Range, NM, will be evident. These high profile tests are being closely watched because the Army is implementing a new approach to large-scale operational test events to accomplish the integration of six programs-of-record and various other technologies into one large tactical network that realistically mirrors the complexity of modern theatres. As JNE emulates the JTRS (and other) waveforms with complete realism, it can "virtually size-up" the network to a scale that is representative of the intensity and distribution of network traffic typical of battlefield deployments without the need for large numbers of actual live radios and their human operators. Thus, it becomes possible for brigade (and larger) missions that involve air assets, urban operations, cyber intrusion and other complicating elements to be played out realistically without the need for actual levels of equipment or human assets. In the same manner that the JNE capability will support the Army's upcoming test events, it can also be useful for other emerging military net-centric mission command applications such as Joint Capabilities Release (JCR) and Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS).