Tuesday, August 19, 2008

BBN grabs $8.9M from DARPA

By Mass High Tech Staff

BBN Technologies Corp. reports it has landed $8.9 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Under the deal, BBN will begin working on Phase 3 of DARPA’s disruption tolerant networking project. Phases 1 and 2 have been completed, and resulted in a working prototype, according to the Cambridge-based company. The DTN project is intended to develop network services that can deliver information even when terrain, weather, jamming, and movement or destruction of nodes have interrupted the path of a message, BBN said.

Under Phase 3, BBN said its scientists and engineers will integrate the DTN system into fielded military networks that may combine several different types of nodes, including wireless, satellite and vehicle-mounted. The company said it also plans to implement a longer term military application; investigate building large-scale networks that self-organize in response to mission needs and develop methods to maintain both the security and controlled availability of persistent data.

Last week, BBN landed a $4.4 million deal from DARPA for work on the Scalable Network Monitoring program, intended to develop alert systems for threats to computer networks.

Last month, BBN won a $12 million grant from the National Science Foundation to design and construct prototypes of IT infrastructure that support network sciences and engineering experiments. BBN said the GENI network infrastructure would enable researchers from multiple disciplines to avoid the limitations of Internet-circumscribed research environments. Also in July, BBN won $5 million in additional funding by the U.S. Department of Defense for a speech transcription program, originally awarded in a $13 million contract in January.

Founded in 1948, BBN is well-known for its role in the development of the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet. BBN specializes in acoustic technology, speech recognition, secure computing and data mining.