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Whitepapers HF Radio

Protocol Architectures to Efficiently Deliver IP Services Over HF Radio

This whitepaper was originally presented at the Nordic HF conference in 2019 by Steve Kille, Isode’s CEO.

SUMMARY

There is a broad interest in providing a range of modern IP application services over HF Radio. NATO has standardized an “IP Client” protocol in STANAG 5066[1] Annex F.12, which is a mandatory part of STANAG 5066 and can be used to deliver any IP service over HF Radio. This paper begins with an analysis of using this protocol and explains why it is often suboptimal, delivering unusably poor performance for many applications.

Then the paper looks at an approach to delivering XMPP services over HF Radio, which worked well down to 300 bits per second in a trial funded by UK MoD and reported on it in a presentation “UK MOD XMPP OVER HF PILOT” to the HF Industry Association in February 2019[2]. The architectural choices needed to achieve this performance are considered.

Providing an approach that will work for a wider range of applications is considered, leading to an analysis of the STANAG 5066 ARQ reliable data transfer service. The paper looks at how this basic service can be extended to provide efficient general-purpose datagram and streaming services, which Isode has published in the open specification “SIS Layer Extension Protocol (SLEP)” (S5066-APP3)[3]. The paper explains why this extra layer is necessary, and how it can be used to provide efficient delivery of a wide range of IP Services over HF.

Read the full whitepaper here

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