Time-efficient Relaying Strategies for Military Communication

Military communication relies on robust and secure physical links that adhere to regulatory protocols and standards for communication. In unfamiliar terrain or hostile conditions these physical links can undergo deep-fading or intentional signal jamming, deteriorating the ongoing communication. Traditional retransmission technology or power adaptation would not be applicable to correct the outages seen in such scenarios, and often relays have been sought out as the solution. However given the exigency related to in-battle military communications, the latency with relaying cannot be tolerated and designing a scheme that is time-efficient is crucial. To this end, we discuss a practical approach to establishing bi-directional communication via a support node that acts a partial relay to the stranded military units, while maintaining its ongoing communication. This is possible through the use of a broadcast spatial multiplexing protocol implemented through space-time block coding at the relay. Our simulation results show us improved BER (bit-error rate) performance than the perfect direct link for high-SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) regimes, and comparable performance across the spectrum. We also demonstrate that our scheme is impervious to power a synchronicities between the stranded military nodes.