RETAIN: Resilient and Self-Healing Protocol Stack for Directional Tactical Mesh Networks

Resilient and self-healing airborne mesh networking provides the essential communication platform for effective information exchange among warfighters to successfully collaborate and execute missions. Existing military waveforms such as the Multifunction Advanced Data Link (MADL) and Common Data Link (CDL) provide limited connectivity and are not scalable due to the excessive increase in latency and inefficient bandwidth utilization. Furthermore, these waveforms cannot perform network self-healing over Anti-access and Area Denial (A2AD) environments, making them unreliable for agile data communication and unable to meet desired efficiency and flexibility requirements expected of airborne networks such as Joint Aerial Layer Network (JALN).  Directional mesh networks offer multiple benefits, including larger communication range, higher link data rate, and better link reliability. When both the transmitter and receiver use narrow beams, the probability that any two links will interfere with each other is significantly reduced. As a result, there is a strong potential for resilient communications in contested and congested A2AD environments as the low probability of intercept/detection (LPI/LPD) are reduced.  Communications in the THz band offers additional security for air-to-air links and the properties of those links make them impenetrable from the ground.