Connecting Communications Waveforms for Combat Effectiveness

Future networks, and in particular military networks, will connect numerous types of homogeneous networks, where a homogeneous network is one that uses the same communications waveform and algorithms to inter-connect all the users of the network. There are a number of challenges in inter-networking disparate waveforms including interacting with a network that does not behave in the same manner as your home network. Examples of such features are described and quantified in this paper and two architectures for connecting heterogeneous waveforms are considered. The goal of this paper is to describe the impact, interfaces, and options for inter-connecting different waveforms.