Military HF communications considering unintentional platform-generated electromagnetic interference

High Frequency (HF) communications are of vital importance for modern military operations. It has the potential to move voice and data communications around the world by bouncing signals off the ionosphere, and at a fraction of the cost of heavily burdened satellite communication frequencies. However, HF-channels are touchy, unpredictable and prone to noise, fading, jamming and interference. Therefore, a number of prediction tools for channel selection have been developed. However, existing tools do not consider the local actual electromagnetic interference at receivers located on navy and army platforms. In this paper we propose a method to include this local electromagnetic interference in the frequency selection and we show how this method can improve the communication performance significantly. We also show that the consideration of local interference in combination with new wideband HF applications creates new challenges for power allocation and we show that the common water-filling solution is not always optimal with respect to data capacity in the system.