US Army developing prototype A-PACE software

A US Army rendering of a prototype adaptive PACE (A-PACE) routing software to interlink disparate tactical radio networks. (US Army)

US Army officials are gathering industry input for the development of new software prototypes to ensure tactical radio systems across the service's portfolio are interoperable across disparate waveforms and networks.

The prototype development initiative, led by Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Network (PEO C3N), will result in a “modular, small form-factor [software] solution that leverages an adaptive PACE (A-PACE) routing technology to enable interoperability across multiple radio networks”, programme officials said in an April broad agency announcement (BAA).

Traditional Primary, Alternate, Contingency, and Emergency (PACE) plans integrated into army radios and other tactical communications systems are complicated, cumbersome, and vary depending on the fielded radio or other radio frequency (RF) communication device.

A-PACE capabilities, as designed, would leverage artificial intelligence (AI) applications to automatically sort through PACE options to send and receive data before selecting the best one to transmit through under combat conditions.

As part of enabling A-PACE communications, the prototype software will also support “analog-to-digital voice conversion, transcoding between various voice codecs, and advanced traffic filtering to optimize network performance”, according to the BAA.

Along with the software development effort, industry offerings for the A-PACE prototype programme will also include a hardware element to support software integration for “analog voice conversion and digital vocoders” while enabling connectivity between at least two disparate tactical radios and associated networks, the BAA stated. “This solution aims to bridge analog voice, digital voice, and IP [internet protocol] data seamlessly, facilitating efficient communication between units and enabling greater mission flexibility,” army officials noted in the solicitation.