NATO eyes full-duplex radio communications

NATO’s Science and Technology Organization took notice of the military potential of same-frequency simultaneous transmission and reception, or SF-STAR, capability employed with full-duplex radio technology, and in 2017 formed an exploratory team to examine the potential use in tactical communications and electronic warfare. The exploratory team “found relevance” in the emerging in-band full-duplex transceiver technology. “The feasibility of full-duplex operation has been convincingly proved for lower-power commercial mobile communication systems in a laboratory environment,” stated a report from the Science and Technology Organization (S&TO). The team recommended additional research to confirm full-duplex radio communication “under realistic conditions in field environments for a selection of relevant operational scenarios,” including applicability at lower military radio frequencies—such as high frequency, or HF; very high frequency, or VHF; and ultra-high frequency, or UHF, applications—the S&TO reported. For the military, the ability to have a technology that can simultaneously transmit and receive radio signals on the same frequency would be a critical function for NATO forces, especially given the increasing demands on spectrum management as well as persistent electronic warfare threats. The tactical communication services provided by NATO-led operations or initiatives—such as the NATO Response Forces, Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, Enhanced Forward Presence and Federated Mission Networking, all of which are gaining in prominence, the S&TO said—could benefit greatly from application of SF-STAR, full-duplex communications.

The exploratory team found that most of the experimental research on full-duplex communications so far had been limited to the 2.4 gigahertz (GHz) industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band. In addition, self-interference cancellation (SIC) capabilities, needed to enable full-duplex communication, are also improving. The team observed that researchers from different universities commonly employed a two-staged SIC approach, one that functions in the analog domain and the other in the digital domain.

https://www.afcea.org/content/nato-eyes-full-duplex-radio-communications