Evaluating Short Forward Error Correction Codes for Avoiding Detection in Airborne Networks

We evaluate Forward Error Correction (FEC) codes in the context of a novel routing protocol HDARP+ for airborne networks. HDARP+ uses directional antennas and dynamic FEC coding to avoid detection by adversaries. The use of FEC coding is dynamic in the sense that different FEC codes, or no FEC code, will be used depending on the relative position of friendly and adversary aircraft. Due to the real-time restrictions in airborne networks, encoding and decoding must be fast and done through table lookup. Since we use table lookup, the FEC codes must be short. We evaluate two types of short FEC codes: Reed-Solomon (RS) codes, and FEC codes found using greedy search (called GS codes). The results show that the RS codes are better than the GS codes at handling error bursts. However, the GS codes are more flexible when it comes to finding attractive trade-offs between the code's ability to increase the number of the cases when hostile detection can be avoided (related to the coding gain), the code rate and the amount of memory required for implementing lookup tables. This paper was originally presented at the NATO Science and Technology Organization Symposium (ICMCIS) organized by the Information Systems Technology (IST) Science and Technology Committee, IST-209-RSY - the ICMCIS, held in Oeiras, Portugal, 13–14 May 2025.