A Novel Resilient HF Data Communications Architecture

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel resilient High Frequency (HF) data communications architecture, optimized for operation in highly cluttered RF environments. The proposed architecture is based on networking a set of geographically dispersed HF transceivers in order to derive a net system gain through diversity reception and transmission. Uniquely, the transceivers in this network make use of STANAG 4538 packet data waveforms. The paper describes the architecture, advantages and benefits, and presents the results from measurement campaigns with the Royal Thai Navy, where the proposed approach is compared to conventional point-to-point STANAG 5066 with MIL-STD-188-110C/D streaming data approaches. Results are given which show that the proposed architecture outperforms conventional implementations, by a considerable margin, in highly cluttered RF environments.