Towards Tactical Military Software Defined Radio with the Assistance of Unmanned Aircraft Systems

This paper presents an idea-phase introduction of a tactical level communication system (battalion and below). The introduced communication system utilizes Unmanned Aircraft Systems to ensure the message throughput and to receive and transmit large quantities of data requiring wide bandwidth. The introduced communication system enables utilizing different waveforms and frequencies when communicating by using Software Defined Radio. The discussed idea-stage solution relies on using Unmanned Aircraft Systems. Unmanned Aircraft Systems can be composed of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles acting as hub-stations to ensure secure communication and reliable data transmission as regards wide bandwidth transmission to base-stations. This article focuses on the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles as part of Unmanned Aerial Systems. This paper introduces possibilities to benefit from Service Oriented Architecture when optimizing the use of Unmanned Aerial Systems. The need for timely and accurate analyzing of the increasing amount of Situational Awareness and Common Operational Picture – related data collected keeps looming large in the battlespace. Similarly, the type and amount of different waveforms and frequencies also keep increasing. Software Defined Radio with its Graphic User Interface application, as discussed in the Results section, may offer one way of freeing the hands of a warrior to handle his or her firearm instead of a myriad of communication devices while in combat. This paper briefly looks at communication enabled by using swarms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and Self Organizing Networks in a military context and provisionally examines what testing and creating such a system would require and does so only at an early idea phase of a concept development process. Copyright © 2015 IFSA Publishing, S. L.