Enhancing JANUS Signaling

During the development of the JANUS Standard, the focus was on transmit description, supported by a “vanilla” receiver design. It was explicitly assumed that vendors would meet or exceed the vanilla receiver through their own efforts. As described by the JANUS “WIKI,” the community now has a basic frequency hopped, non-coherently received methodology useful for a limited set of applications. Extending the list of applications will require additional receiver capabilities and resources, while one (at least) may require a more capable transmitter. This paper does not explicitly suggest standards, rather it advocates for development and informal community adoption of algorithms and methods designed to enhance performance and utility of common signaling methods. Within any list of potential upgrades for JANUS, the following four are important: a) compensation for severe frequency dependent fading; b) multi-access support and interference reduction; c) compensation for range rate (relative speed); and d) precision ranging while retaining standard noncoherent acquisition robustness). We have implemented solutions for each of these items in our Popoto modems, and each has significantly enhanced communications performance. The authors are prepared to support a community effort by providing detailed algorithmic definitions for these upgrades. However, given the short paper format of this conference, we restrict the discussions to overview and examples of our approaches.