The Survivable Radio Network (SURAN) project was sponsored by

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Ad ...

in the 1980s to develop a set of

mobile ad hoc network A wireless ad hoc network (WANET) or mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a decentralized type of wireless network. The network is ad hoc because it does not rely on a pre-existing infrastructure, such as routers in wired networks or access points ...

(MANET) radio-routers, then known as "packet radios". It was a follow-on to DARPA's earlier

PRNET The Packet Radio Network (PRNET) was a set of early, experimental mobile ad hoc networks whose technologies evolved over time. It was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Major participants in the project included BBN Technolog ...

project. The program began in 1983 with the following goals: * develop a small, low-cost, low-power radio that would support more sophisticated packet radio protocols than the DARPA Packet Radio project from the 1970s * develop and demonstrate algorithms that could scale to tens of thousands of nodes * develop and demonstrate techniques for robust and survivable packet networking in sophisticated electronic attacks. A follow-on program in 1987, the Low-cost Packet Radio (LPR), attempted further innovations in mobile networking protocols, with design goals including: * management of radio spreading codes for security, and increasing capacity * new queue management and forwarding techniques for spread spectrum channels * scalability based on dynamic clustering

BBN Technologies Raytheon BBN (originally Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.) is an American research and development company, based next to Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. In 1966, the Franklin Institute awarded the firm the Frank P. Brown ...

provided the MANET protocols,Gregory S. Lauer, "Hierarchical routing design for SURAN", ''IEEE International Conference on Communications'', 1986. and Rockwell provided radio hardware. The prototype radios produced in these programs were known as VRC-99 radios, and were used by the Department of Defense throughout the 1990s for experimentation.

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See also