Full-Duplex Radio – Increasing the Spectral Efficiency for Military Applications

This paper summarizes the results of the NATO STO IST Panel’s Exploratory Team IST-ET-101. The team studied the full-duplex radio technology as an innovative solution to deal with the scarce and congested electromagnetic frequency spectrum, especially in the VHF and UHF bands. This scarcity is in strong contrast to the growing bandwidth requirements generally and particularly in the military domain. The success of future NATO operations relies more than ever on new real-time services going hand in hand with increased data throughputs as well as with robustness against and compatibility with electronic warfare. Therefore, future tactical communication and electronic warfare technologies must aim at exploiting the spectral resources to the maximum while at the same time providing NATO with an advantage in the tactical environment.