Client application considerations for low bandwidth communications using STANAG 5066

The transmission of commercial SMTP e-mail over the HF communications bearer is explicitly supported by proxy agents in the STANAG 5066 profile. This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the performance of the Compressed File Transfer Protocol (CFTP) and HF Mail Transfer Protocol (HMTP) proxy agents defined in STANAG 5066. The performance of proxy agents is then compared with the performance achieved using SMTP and other standard TCP/IP network applications with the PPP and IP clients defined in STANAG 5066. A critical comparison of the merits of the various approaches for the practical implementation of networked HF applications over STANAG 5066 in support of network centric warfare in a maritime environment is provided.