RAIDR overview

RAIDR is an API-first 3D mission-planning platform for tactical radio networks. It computes link budgets, terrain-aware coverage, multi-hop relay chains, and mesh routing over real terrain using deterministic, ITU-R-grade propagation physics.

The engine is pure and tested. Every number a planner sees traces to a closed-form ITU-R recommendation evaluated on WGS84 geodesy and SRTM terrain — not an estimate, not a model fit. The same physics code compiles to native and to wasm32, so the server and the browser produce identical results.

What RAIDR computes

• Point-to-point link budgets: free-space path loss, knife-edge and multi-edge diffraction, gaseous absorption, rain attenuation, multipath fade margin, antenna gain in the realised path direction, noise floor, SNR, achievable rate, and a closure verdict.
• Terrain profiles between two coordinates, sampled along the WGS84 geodesic with MSL and HAE elevation at each point.
• Area coverage: a grid of receivers around a source node, each evaluated as a full link, streamed to the client as it computes.
• Multi-hop relay planning: greedy geodesic-aligned relay placement to meet a target data rate.
• Mesh routing: Dijkstra shortest-path over a deployment graph with ETT, ETX, bottleneck, or hop-count metrics.
• Protocol recommendation: a scored ranking of mesh routing protocols against a deployment's measured link characteristics.

Architecture at a glance

RAIDR is a Rust workspace of five crates plus a vanilla-JavaScript frontend.

raidr/
├── crates/
│   ├── trnp-geo/      WGS84, Vincenty geodesics, ECEF/ENU, EGM96 geoid
│   ├── trnp-physics/  FSPL · P.526 diffraction · P.676 atmospheric
│   │                  P.838 rain · P.530 fade · antennas · modulation
│   ├── trnp-terrain/  SRTM HGT mmap provider + geodesic profile sampling
│   ├── trnp-server/   axum + sqlx(SQLite) REST + SSE on :8787
│   └── trnp-wasm/     wasm-bindgen wrappers for browser-side analysis
└── frontend/          Cesium 1.118 · vanilla JS · no build step

The internal codename for the workspace and its crates is trnp (terrain radio network planner). The crate prefix trnp- and the TRNP_ environment variables reflect that codename. The product is RAIDR.

Design principles

RAIDR holds to a few constraints that shape the whole system.

• Determinism. Physics routines are pure functions on plain structs. No global state, no allocator on the hot path. Given identical inputs they return identical outputs on every platform.
• One physics implementation. trnp-physics compiles twice — native for the server, wasm32 for the browser — so client-side link math during node drag matches the server byte for byte.
• API first. Every capability is a REST endpoint under /api/v1. The frontend is one client of that API; any client can drive RAIDR.
• Traceable values. Each loss and margin term maps to a named ITU-R recommendation, documented in source alongside its simplifying assumptions.

Where to go next

• Getting started — build the server, run it, and open the frontend.
• Concepts and architecture — deployments, nodes, the request lifecycle, and how the crates fit together.
• Propagation physics — the link budget and the ITU-R recommendations behind each term.
• Geo and terrain — WGS84 geodesy, the EGM96 geoid, and SRTM elevation.
• Server and API — endpoints, coverage streaming, and error format.
• Frontend and WASM client — the Cesium scene and in-browser physics.
• LLM integration — the proposed natural-language orchestration layer.
• Configuration and operations — environment variables, presets, and operating the server.