Survivable Multiband Networking

The survivability of communication systems has been a longstanding requirement for various command-and-control systems. Previous approaches have concentrated on building hardened systems that operate separately from the normal, day-to-day military communications systems, leaving vulnerable general strategic communications. Since it is impractical to harden all communications systems, a methodology has been developed that combines the inherent robustness of packet-switching technology with the diversity of transmission systems and media available to the military. This use of multiple types of transmission media to obtain redundancy and survivability in the face of attack has recently gained increased attention. This paper extends prior work, which concentrated mainly on link issues, by proposing a unified communication architecture for multi-band networking.