Link Enhancer for Vehicular Wireless ATM Communications

Abstract: Majority of the applications used in defense are voice, video and data oriented and has strict QoS requirements. One of the technologies that enabled this is Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networking. Traditional ATM networks are wired networks. But Tactical networks are meant to be mobile and this necessitates the use of radio relays for Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications. ATM networks assume a physical link layer BER of 10^-9 or better because of the availability of reliable media like optical fiber links. But this assumption is no longer valid when ATM switches are connected through radio relay where error rates are in the rage of 10^-3. This paper presents the architecture of a Link Enhancer meant to improve the Bit Error Rate of the Wireless links used for V2I and V2V communications from 1 in 10^4 to 1 in 10^8