Advanced strategies for traffic and frequency management in large HF networks

The authors describe is the suite of integrated network algorithms developed for use in models of a large Australian military HF tactical information network (HF modernisation project). They were developed to perform automatic node selection (routing), frequency selection, link maintenance and traffic management functions and rely upon a standard automatic link establishment (ALE) protocol for signalling. The aim of the algorithms is to optimise, for any set of traffic delivery criteria and traffic volume, the grade of service (GOS), the probability of servicing traffic within defined time constraints. To our knowledge, no such algorithms have previously been developed for large HF networks. We describe the new algorithms and demonstrate their effectiveness by simulation