Highly Scalable Signals in Space for Future High Data Rate Military Applications

Future military communications systems, on both national and international levels, will demand the capability of transmitting high data rates over self-organising ad-hoc networks. In the work presented in this paper we describe a high data rate signal in space (HDR-SiS) developed by Rohde & Schwarz, that enables the transmission of real time video, voice and data in a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET). The transmission scheme uses OFDM at bandwidths ranging from 1 MHz to 10 MHz in order to be adaptable to various national and international spectral usage requirements. OFDM has the advantage of a high spectral efficiency and, given an appropriate design, simple equalisation techniques can be used in order to deal with multi-path channel environments. Although OFDM is already used in many standards such as WLAN, WiMAX, DVB-T, these systems were designed for either stationary and/or indoor applications. The presented SiS is optimised for mobile operators with relative speeds up to several hundred kilometres per hour and multi-path delays corresponding to relative distances of around 15 km