Concepts for a reliable multicast data link protocol for HF radio communications

Recent years have seen dramatic increases in HF network communications capacity, realized through the innovative communications protocols and techniques contained in the NATO standard STANAG 4538: automatic radio control system (ARCS). As a result of these improvements, use of HF for delivery of IP network traffic is becoming useful and practical. A major unmet challenge is that of providing an effective capability for delivering multicast data traffic (from one sender to multiple recipients) over HF channels. Lack of such capabilities is frequently an obstacle to using HF as a bearer medium for common tactical C3I applications such as FBCB2 ("blue force tracker"). This paper describes and analyzes techniques that can be used to provide an efficient HF multicast delivery capability suited to these kinds of applications