Anti-Jamming and Time Delay Performance Analysis of Future SATURN Upgraded Military Aerial Communication Tactical Systems

For over half a century, the United States (US) and its coalition military aircrafts have been using Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band analog modulation (AM) radios in ground-to-air communication and short-range air-to-air communications. Evolving from this, since 2007, the US military and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) adopted HAVE QUICK to be used by almost all aircrafts, because it had been revealed that intercepting and jamming of former aircraft communication signals was possible, which placed a serious threat to defense systems. The second-generation Anti-jam Tactical UHF Radio for NATO (SATURN) was developed to replace HAVE QUICK systems by 2023. The NATO Standardization Agreement (STANAG) 4372 is a classified document that defines the SATURN technical and operational specifications. In preparation of this future upgrade to SATURN systems, in this paper, the SATURN technical and operational specifications are reviewed, and the network synchronization, frequency hopping, and communication setup parameters that are controlled by the Network (NET) Time, Time Of Day (TOD), Word Of Day (WOD), and Multiple Word of Day (MWOD) are described in addition to SATURN Edition 3 (ED3) and future Edition 4 (ED4) basic features. In addition, an anti-jamming performance analysis (in reference to partial band jamming and pulse jamming) and the time delay queueing model analysis are conducted based on a SATURN transmitter and receiver assumed model.