Provisioning Tactical MILSATCOM through DVB Augmentation

The past twenty years have seen exponential growth in tactical data exchange on the battlefield. The Information Exchange Requirements (IERs) of the 'network enabled' soldier, when combined with the greater dispersion and mobility expected of land forces operations, threaten to overwhelm traditional line-of- sight (LoS) HF, VHF and UHF networks and the spectrum management systems needed to support them. Recent advances in military SHF satellite beamforming and downlink power performance enable small tactical SATCOM terminals to deliver high data rates. The commercial Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) standard contains a state-of-the-art physical layer (PHY) offering spectrally efficient waveforms as well as a control and management plane for enabling two-way SATCOM thus providing a reduced developmental cost in the procurement of a MILSATCOM solution.

This paper assesses how SHF MILSATCOM, used in the past mainly for 'reachback' or strategic links, can now employ modified, commercially-developed techniques such as DVB and meshed Multi-Frequency – Time Division Multiple Access (MF-TDMA) Return Channel via Satellite (RCS) to provide a robust, cost-effective, flexible and bandwidth-efficient means of augmenting LoS tactical networks, while retaining the ubiquity, mobility and ease of deployment which are SATCOM's hallmarks. It shows how SATCOM can now capitalise on the advances being made in IP networking. It also shows how these techniques can be used on Software- Defined Radio (SDR) platforms to achieve interoperability amongst heterogeneous tactical radio networks, a major step toward bearer-level transparency in the Global Information Infrastructure (GII).