Tactical Radio Overview

Tactical radios, especially pre-JTRS radios, have very low bandwidth. For example, SINCGARS radios can operate at 9.6Kbps or 12Kbps. By comparison, a dial-up internet connection is usually 56Kbps.

The overhead of a conventional routing protocol will consume all of this bandwidth before the network scales past 10 nodes. The unique ability of the OrderOne Networks protocol to send only one, fixed-size, control packet every time-interval makes it ideal to organize large networks of low bandwidth radios.

Low Bandwidth Radios
Organizing low bandwidth radios such as SINCGARS radios is a significant challenge to which the OrderOne Networks protocol is uniquely suited.

Low Bandwidth SINCGARS Radio

For example, the OrderOne Networks protocol could be configured to broadcast one 100 byte packet every 15 seconds. This is equivalent to 0.053Kbps. A network of one hundred radios in which only ten radios were ever sharing the same radio space would consume at most 0.53Kps, or approximately 4.5% of the available bandwidth.

More directly, a network with 100 12Kbps SINCGARS radios would require a total of 4.5% of the available bandwidth in order to organize into a self-forming, self-healing network. No other routing protocol is able to organize these radios, let alone leave over 95% of the bandwidth available for user data traffic.

Higher Bandwidth Radios
Higher bandwidth radios such as JTRS Cluster 1 radios have a bandwidth of approximately 2Mbps or 160x more bandwidth than a SINCGARS radio.

Higher Bandwidth JTRS Cluster 1 Radio

These radios were designed to help link the entire theatre of operations into one seamlessly connected environment for at least the next twenty years. With higher bandwidth radios the ability of a routing protocol to scale to large network sizes becomes much more important. With most routing protocols experiencing performance degradation and control bandwidth growth at several hundred nodes a scalable routing protocol is a necessity.

The OrderOne Networks protocol can meet this need. It can organize networks with 10,000's of nodes and very dense networks with 100's of directly visible neighbors. It can do this while never using more than 0.08% of available bandwidth.

Commercial Radios
Not all tactical environments need designed-for-purpose military radios. The OrderOne Networks protocol may be installed on devices that use Wifi, WiMAX, or low bandwidth radios manufactured by companies such as MaxStream or ChipCon.