Netwars Based Study of a Joint STARS Link-16 Network

Both secure and anti-jam resistant, the Link-16 is the primary communications channel used by the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (Joint STARS) for the exchange of real-time tactical data among various ground, air, and sea platforms of the United States of America and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces. This research explored the effect of increasing network traffic for imagery transfer to the mean delay when operating under different network topologies. Using Network Warfare Simulation (NETWARS), three different missions were simulated to run on five network topologies having a different number of participants, different assigned time slots, and stacked nets. As a result, this study determined that the Link-16 network is able to handle the increase in network traffic, from 30 kilobits per second to 50 kilobits per second, when using multiple stacked net configurations while assigning an adequate number of time slots. However, because each participant is limited to 128 time slots per second, the increased network traffic limits the communication ability of other participants.