Autonomous tactical communications possibilities and problems

In the battlefield of the future, more and more information will be available for making decisions on a tactical level, provided that this information can be dispersed rapidly and accurately. As a consequence, advanced tactical decision support that now is limited to advanced platforms (e.g. combat aircrafts) will become available at a much lower level, ranging from different kind of vehicles, down to the individual soldier by means of ultra-light weight “wearable” equipment. Establishing reliable wireless communications in such a large group of users with unprecedented bandwidth demands and requirements on survivability constitutes a considerable engineering challenge. After a short review of some existing approaches, we investigate the specific engineering challenges and the fundamental limitations of such low level, autonomous communication systems. Further we give an example of a system architecture, harmonized with a proposed structure for third generation commercial wireless systems (e.g. UMTS). Our conclusions show that mainly the distributed computing complexity, device power consumption and the available bandwidth constitute the fundamental problems