Metrodata's involvement with US Naval Research  Labs goes back to 2002 when we developed a cell bearing serial interface for an experimental COTS suite for C4I.

At the time we had a widely used EIA530 serial interface but this was purely for Circuit Emulation, providing asymmetric services with data rates from 8kbps to 20Mbps in 1bps increments.

We also had a HSSI ATM cell bearing interface, but NRL wanted EIA530 interfacing, so we developed an ATM variant of our EIA530 interface again capable of asymmetric data rates up to 20Mbps, however this time the clocking could be slaved off the satellite modem, allowing exact clocking for 100% data integrity.

The other key feature that was added was an automatic crypto resync function which automatically detects when the encrypters have lost synchronisation and forces them to resynchronise. When a ship moved between satellite footprints encrypter synchronisation was lost and this automatic crypto resync function kicked in to re-establish communications within seconds. Historically this resync function was a time consuming manual process which could have had serious consequences if it had happened at a critical time.

This Experimental suite was for Naval Warfare Development Command, SPAWAR and US NRL for use in the Millenium Challenge 02.

After success in the above exercise it was deployed to the Gulf.

Mr. Guy Purser, Chief Engineer for NWDC, had specific goals for the type of C4I suite to prototype on the Joint Venture. "We wanted a state-of-the-art complement of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) systems that provided an integrated workstation for applications, voice, and radio whether the application or transmission was local or long haul. Joint Venture has demonstrated the efficacy of this COTS design in actual combat conditions with a high state of reliability."