Providing Resilient, Low-Latency Connectivity from Unmanned Systems in Contested and Bandwidth-Constrained Environments
The Challenges
Defense and Civilian organizations struggle to get reliable, real-time video and telemetry data from unmanned devices, including drones, surface vessels, and sensors. This is especially true in contested or bandwidth-constrained environments.
Links are easily degraded by distance, congestion, and jamming, forcing painful trade-offs between image quality, latency, and continuity.
In addition, these links are often rapidly deployed using a patchwork of satellite, cellular, and UHF networks. This regularly introduces elements of unpredictability associated with changes in terrain and movement, bandwidth fluctuations, and network hand-offs.
Our Solution
KenCast’s solution provides a reliable communications link between the origination device and monitoring locations while maintaining strict adherence to latency requirements.
We accomplish this by:
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Utilizing algorithms that blend advanced forward error correction and packet retransmission to meet latency and potential packet reordering requirements.
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Bonding and managing traffic over several links steering packets where they have best chance of succeeding – predicting link performance before issues arise.
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Introducing link prioritization such that you can have a concept of cost control without affecting the required performance.
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Setting priorities on streams making sure mission critical streams get priority over less important ones.
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Providing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for users to monitor the networks performance.
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Three core features of “product” include:
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Adaptive Forward-Error Correction (FEC) based on network conditions.
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Adherence to strict latency constraints through autonomous algorithm Dynamic Load Distribution across multiple networks.
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Dynamic Load Distribution across multiple networks.
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Advanced Forward-Error Correction: Our software includes a suite of advanced algorithms that reduce retransmission delay by adding bits of carefully selected redundancy that allow the receiver to detect and correct errors on the fly. For mission-critical video telemetry, and control, these algorithms dramatically reduce visible artifacts created by freezes, macro-blocking, and glitches while preserving lower-latency by removing the lag associated with round-trip correction requests.
Jitter Buffer Integration into Transport Protocol: Traditional jitter buffering of video streams at the receiver adds latency to provide a smoother viewing experience. Our software removes this latency by integrating the jitter buffer logic directly into the transport protocol. This feature also allows us to discard video frames that would arrive outside of the desired latency budget.
Adherence to strict latency constraints through autonomous algorithms: Our algorithm dynamically adjusts between sending FEC data and retransmitting packets to make sure packets arrive in time and in order. The algorithm also selects what network to route each packet based on current network conditions and the latency requirement.
Dynamic Load Distribution: For multi-path networks (example: LEO satellite and Cellular), our software allows you to bond transport across these networks dynamically providing resiliency and optimization while helping reduce latency without manual intervention. This feature also allows the user to establish service priorities to align with their preferences.
Why KenCast
Since 1994, KenCast has been trusted to provide state-of-the-art content delivery software and integrated hardware solutions to the leading organization spanning the Government, Critical Communications, Broadcast, Mobility, and Digital Cinema industries. Based in Stamford, Connecticut, our solutions are deployed globally.
