Optimizing the Interoperability of Military Satellite Communications

Satellite communications offer mobility and communications for military operations in remote locations where terrestrial-based connectivity is not available, or is too expensive. Unfortunately, satellite connectivity brings many challenges that can impair network performance in delivering mission-critical information and applications. High-latency transport and application protocol inefficiencies, adverse weather, and interference are just a few of the causes that slow the delivery of applications and limit the amount of traffic that can run over a satellite link. Compounding these problems is interoperability among disparate military networks that can jeopardize mission-critical communications.

To address some of these issues, NASA and the Department of Defense (DoD) jointly created the Space Communications Protocol Standards (SCPS) protocol suite that has been deployed throughout the U.S. military. SCPS-TP is designed to overcome transport protocol interoperability problems and enable satellite WAN links to have a greater amount of traffic flow.

The U.S. DoD operates in areas of the world where bandwidth is extremely scarce and expensive. The military is very mobile, and communications can be time sensitive. Providing a comprehensive solution for reliable and fast military communications has become an ever-increasing challenge — balancing security, speed of delivery and bandwidth consumption.

Two Requirements

There are two requirements for improving reliability, performance and interoperability.

First Requirement
As mentioned above, the SCPS protocol suite was jointly developed by NASA and the DoD. However, an SCPS implementation that has become the “defacto standard” transport protocol is SkipWare from Global Protocols, a protocol engineering firm specializing in the development and integration of bandwidth efficient, error-tolerant protocol solutions based on SCPS. SkipWare is the industry’s first commercial SCPS implementation. SCPS addresses these issues with a set of protocols that offer:

• Best possible use of limited bandwidth
  
• High link utilization
• Power conservation
  
• Traffic prioritization
  
• Tolerance of intermittent connectivity
  
• High forward/return link asymmetry
  
• Adaptation to the environmental stress of wireless networks