In modern warfare concepts, the use of wireless communications and network-centric topologies with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) creates an opportunity to combine the familiar concepts of wireless beamforming in opportunistic random arrays and swarm UAVs. Similar in concept to the collaborative beamforming used in ground-based randomly distributed array systems, our novel approach improves wireless beamforming performance by leveraging cooperative location and function knowledge. This enables the capabilities of individual UAVs to be enhanced, using swarming and cooperative beamforming techniques, for more-effective support of complex radar jamming and deception missions. In addition, a dedicated System Oversight function can be used to optimize the number of beamforming UAVs required to jam a given target and manage deception assets.
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