A performance analysis on the application of commercial standards for IP SATCOM modems

The role of satellite communications (SATCOM) in support of the deployed warfighter has increased in recent years. With this increased reliance on SATCOM, the importance for a Department of Defense (DoD) wide strategy to efficiently procure and utilize the limited set of commercial DoD space assets has been emphasized. A step in the migration towards this strategy will be the development of a standard, multi-access, packet-based protocol that provides bandwidth on demand to the Joint warfighter. The digital video broadcast (DVB) standard chosen for this waveform leverages existing commercial modem technologies and offers a mature standard base which minimizes the development burden on the DoD. Of key interest for the tactical warfighter is the ability of the DVB family of standards to support certain functional capabilities: 1) to support robust communications while on-the-move (COTM), 2) to support a full mesh architecture, 3) to support a mix of non-real time, and real time traffic, and, 4) a capability to scale to large number of users and very efficiently share bandwidth. This paper provides a summary of a set of analyses that was performed to quantify the performance of the DVB standards to meet the four capabilities highlighted above. The analysis also inherently provides some insight on the challenges of applying commercial modem technologies to the battlefield