Data distribution over IP in high error rate military radio environments

Most military radio systems exhibit relatively high bit error rates up to 10^-3 and possibly even higher. Many of these are located in the battlefield and are mobile, leading to temporary outages due to terrain blocking of signals. In battlefield situations, information delivery is critical and the highest priority and needs to be able to get through the relatively low bandwidth high error rate radio links in the fastest time possible. The most used transport protocol in the IP is TCP, which provides error free data to applications above it. However, there are a number of reasons why TCP is not suitable for this environment: first, it is designed for very low error environments, which means that all packet loss is interpreted as congestion, making the rate fall back to the lowest possible; and second, TCP is designed to be “fair” with all other TCP traffic, meaning there are no priorities. Both of these characteristics are opposite to the requirements in military situations, when the information needs to be transferred at the fastest rate possible in high error environments with the highest priority. The MFTP, which operates over the UDP, is a good candidate protocol to use in these situations. It can operate in both multicast and unicast modes (radio transmissions can easily support multicast), and has implicit priority over TCP traffic. It has been shown to operate very effectively in high error rate radio links with testing in real links at Fort Monmouth, NJ. This paper discusses these issues and gives some test results