Maximum Interconnectedness and Availability for Directional Airborne Range Extension Networks

Extending the range of tactical military networks that are confined to a local geographic area by using small aircraft to relay traffic to geographically distant areas is a topic of interest in military network technology development. Highly directional antennas, incorporated into avionics pods that attach modularly to an aircraft fuselage, can provide long-range, interference-resistant communications at high data rates for range extension. Antenna elements in such designs typically have limited field-of-view (FoV), potentially making interconnectedness among communication nodes dependent on the geometry of the physical network. This paper examines generic sectorized and non-sectorized pod antenna designs and compares the interconnectedness and link availability of these designs in representative range extension network layouts. Mathematical criteria for 100% link availability are presented, and quantitative tradeoffs between link availability and node interconnectedness are derived as functions of the number of antenna beams per pod, the number of beams per sector, and the number of surface users to be supported.1 Index Terms Range extension, directional networks, network topology, beamforming. Thomas Shake and Rahul Amin are with the Tactical Networks Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA 02420 USA e-mail: ([email protected], [email protected]) 1Distribution A: approved for public release; unlimited distributon. This work is sponsored by the United States Department of the Navy under Air Force Contract #FA8721-05-C-0002. Opinions, interpretations, recommendations and conclusions are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the United States Government. August 29, 2016 DRAFT 2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS