CR - Khan BMS Battlefield Management System
Working notes on CR (Cognitive Radio): ew mesh context, design trade-offs, and where it fits in the Arban–Tumen hierarchy.
Cognitive Radio is the kind of capability you only notice when it is missing. CR sits inside the OODA loop, not next to it — which is exactly why it gets shortchanged in budget cycles.
CR, expanded, is Cognitive Radio — Radio that senses its RF environment and adapts waveform, frequency, and power autonomously. Cognitive Radio extends SDR with a sensing and decision loop that continuously evaluates spectrum occupancy, link quality, and threats, and re-tunes the waveform to maintain communication. In contested environments, cognitive radios autonomously hop frequencies, change modulation, or switch waveforms to evade jamming. DARPA's Spectrum Collaboration Challenge is the canonical reference event for the technology class.
In our reference deployment, CR runs at the edge with no continuous-uplink assumption. Nodes carry the last lawful CR state, gossip updates when bandwidth allows, and reconcile via a vector-clock scheme borrowed from distributed-database literature.
CR is anchored at the Arban — ten nodes under one tactical leader. Small enough to reason about by hand, large enough to absorb the loss of a node without re-planning. Authority for CR is bounded at this tier; nothing the Arban does can poison its parent.
CR is one of perhaps a dozen primitives that decide whether a modern force can fight through denial. Khan BMS is built on the premise that all of them deserve the same treatment.