A Packet-Switched Overlay for Tactical Multi-Channel and Satellite Systems

Since its inception in the early 1970s, packet switching has become an accepted wide-area data communications technology. Packet switching has found widespread use in the R&D community (e.g., the original ARPANET), as a service provided by value-added common carriers in the commercial marketplace, and in fixed-plant DoD data communications applications (e.g., the Defense Data Network, DDN). More recently, work has been done to demonstrate the applicability of packet switching in the tactical environment. This paper presents the problems of data communication in the tactical environment, and describes a testbed effort employing DDN-compatible BBN Communications Corporation C/30 packet-switching nodes using 32 kb/s inter-switch trunks derived from Army tactical multichannel and satellite communications systems. This system is in use in a laboratory environment at USA CECOM, Ft. Monmouth, NJ and in field testbed environments at Ft. Lewis, WA and Ft. Bragg, NC. The system employs a Forward Error Correction (FEC) algorithm implemented in C/30 microcode to cope with the error environment typically encountered with tactical communications channels.