Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), Contracts Management Office (CMO), 3701 North Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA 22203-1714

A -- GLOBAL MOBILE INFORMATION SYSTEMS (GLOMO) SOL BAA95-16 DUE 042895 POC Barry M. Leiner, POC, ARPA/CSTO, FAX: (703)522-2668. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) is soliciting proposals in the area of global mobile information systems (GloMo). This activity is aimed at developing advanced techniques for supporting information and computing systems operation while in motion. The motivation behind the program is the military requirement for efficient and effective access to information and the ability to manipulate such information in an environment characterized by rapid changes in connectivity and bandwidth. This BAA focuses on research interests in the following five technical areas: 1) Design Infrastructure: Integrated design tools, techniques, and environments supporting the automated design including simulation, synthesis, physical design, and test of wireless systems spanning individual integrated circuits to applications running over wireless networks. Design tools that leverage scalable computing, address low-power design, address hardware-software co-design, or the multi-disciplinary nature of wireless system design are of particular interest. Projects may include extensions to existing design environments or entirely new concepts or approaches. Design tool development should be completed through validation and testing to include validation on the design and demonstration of hardware. Design tools and environments should be capable of realistically meeting the system complexity requirements implicit in the GLOMO program goals. Technical Point of Contact: Robert H. Parker 2) Untethered Node Architectures: The goal is to develop and demonstrate modular commercial architectures for wireless nodes that may be enhanced to support military requirements. The goal is a modular, product line approach that supports the range of requirements from commercial through to the demanding requirements of military and civilian disaster management environments. In particular, the military should be able to procure systems through straightforward enhancements to available commercial systems. Proposed efforts should leverage and may include advanced component technology development such as integrated passives, batteries, filters, packaging, and VLSI that substantially increase the levels of integration and reduce the size and/or cost of resulting nodes. Architectures should leverage programmability and standard physical form factors such as PCMCIA to produce miniaturized modular units that will support sophisticated network management in a multi-hop environment, and waveform diversity such as required by spread spectrum. Technical Point of Contact: Robert H. Parker 3) Wireless Network Systems: Military and civilian disaster management environments demand networking technologies that will support rapid deployment, self-configuration, multi-hop capability, and robust survivability. The purpose of this portion is to develop the network architectures, algorithms, and protocols that will provide these features while at the same time exploiting the radio technologies discussed above. Earlier results in packet radio network systems should be considered as a starting point for development of such systems, with enhancements incorporated to support such requirements as multimedia communications. Technical Point of Contact: Barry M. Leiner 4) End-to-End Mobile Networking: The goal of this activity is to provide effective and reliable end-to-end communications in an environment including mobile components with their resulting variability in connectivity and bandwidth. Specific issues to be addressed in this portion include motion between subnetworks and an enriched service interface that will allow applications to be informed of the currently available connectivity, bandwidth, latency, and error rates. This portion of the program will be conducted in close coordination with the overall thrust in networking technology, and should be considered as an enhancement to current Internet directions. Technical Point of Contact: Michael C. StJohns. 5) Mobile Information Systems: The goal of this activity is to develop techniques for applications to effectively operate in a mobile environment, taking full advantage of the underlying communications. Techniques to be developed include but are not limited to methods for applications to adapt to variations in the underlying communications connectivity and parameters, distributed file systems that deal with sporadic connectivity, migratable computing that support varying node availability, etc. Technical Point of Contact: Barry M. Leiner. The focus of this solicitation is on an integrated set of technologies that can support effective, reliable, and robust information systems in a mobile environment typical of military operations. Proposals may address multiple areas in an integrated fashion. In particular, proposals that address Areas 2 and 3 (Untethered Node Architectures and Wireless Network Systems) in an integrated fashion are encouraged. Proposals that leverage the design infrastructure in Area 1 to produce results in another area are encouraged. Proposals that incorporate both technology development and demonstration are encouraged. Demonstrations should be aimed at motivating and/or validating technology development and not as stand-alone demonstrations. Collaborative university/industry research and development is desirable to ensure technology transfer. Teaming arrangements and cost sharing are encouraged where appropriate, especially when coupling technology developments to applications demonstrations. However, teaming is not essential in all of the technical areas of research. PROGRAM SCOPE: Proposals for individual efforts should not exceed three years in length. Technologies which have a broad impact on military capability will be given highest priority. Contract awards are expected to be made during the second half of fiscal year 1995. Total funding is expected to be approximately $30,000,000 over three years. Multiple awards will be made. Collaborative efforts and teaming are encouraged where appropriate. GENERAL INFORMATION: A briefing describing this activity will be given on 8 Feb 95. Questions and answers resulting from this briefing as well as the slides used will be available electronically from http://www.csto. arpa.mil. Reservations for attendance at this briefing must be made no later than 3 Feb 95. Parties interested in attending this briefing should contact David Sanders, DSanders@arpa.mil, (703) 284-8202. In order to minimize unnecessary effort in proposal preparation and review, proposers are strongly encouraged to submit brief proposal abstracts in advance of full proposals. An original and four (4) copies of the proposal abstract must be submitted to ARPA/CSTO, 3701 North Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA 22203-1714 (ATTN: BAA 95-16) on or before 24 Feb 95. Proposal abstracts received after this date may not be reviewed. Upon review, ARPA will provide written feedback on the likelihood of a full proposal being selected. Proposers must submit an original and four (4) copies of full proposals by 28 Apr 95, in order to be considered. Proposers must obtain a pamphlet, BAA 95-16 Proposer Information, which provides further information on areas of interest, the submission, evaluation, funding processes, proposal and proposal abstract formats. This pamphlet may be obtained by fax, electronic mail, or mail request to the administrative contact address given below, as well as at URL address http://www.csto.arpa.mil/Solicitations. Proposals not meeting the format described in the pamphlet may not be reviewed. This notice, in conjunction with the pamphlet BAA 95-16 Proposer Information, constitutes the total BAA. No additional information is available, nor will a formal RFP or other solicitation regarding this announcement be issued. Requests for same will be disregarded. The Government reserves the right to select for award all, some, or none of the proposals received. All responsible sources capable of satisfying the Government's needs may submit a proposal which shall be considered by ARPA. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) and Minority Institutions (MI) are encouraged to submit proposals and join others in submitting proposals. However, no portion of this BAA will be set aside for HBCU and MI participation due to the impracticality of reserving discrete or severable areas of research in GloMo. Evaluation of proposals will be accomplished through a technical review of each proposal using the following criteria, which are listed in descending order of relative importance: (1) overall scientific and technical merit, (2) potential contribution and relevance to ARPA mission, (3) offeror's capabilities and related experience (4) plans and capability to accomplish technology transition, (5) cost realism. Note: Cost realism will only be significant in proposals which have significantly under- or overestimated the cost to complete their effort. All administrative correspondence and questions on this solicitation, including requests for information on how to submit a proposal abstract or proposal to this BAA, should be directed to one of the administrative addresses below, e-mail or fax is preferred. ARPA intends to use electronic mail and fax for correspondence regarding BAA 95-16. Proposals and proposal abstracts may not be submitted by fax, any so sent will be disregarded. The administrative addresses for this BAA are: Fax: (703) 522-2668 Addressed to:ARPA/CSTO, BAA 95-16 Electronic Mail: baa9516@arpa.mil Electronic File Retrieval: http://www.csto.arpa.mil/Solicitations, Mail: ARPA/CSTO ATTN: BAA 95-16, 3701 N. Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA 22203-1714 (0018)

Loren Data Corp. http://www.ld.com (SYN# 0001 19950119\A-0001.SOL)