Is more robust satcom needed?Deficiencies and protection measures in satellite communication systems

Satellite communication have been used for many years by the Swedish Armed Forces, as a connection to the fixed communication infrastructure of the Armed Forces. Through such a connection, most of the services in the fixed infrastructure are available in almost any location. Satcom has been used in the international missions the Swedish Armed Forces have been part of, and the satcom system has evolved during the years. Satcom has mainly been used for services like welfare, logistics and personal administration. There is however an on-going change to the use of packet data based services (all IP), and to view satcom as a general transmission resource. This gives the possibility to use many different services over satcom, also services that was not originally designed for that transmission medium. In the future, satcom could be used for command, possibly even in battle, and at considerably higher threat levels than today. The demands for robustness will then be considerably higher than today. In order to make correct decisions on the use of satcom, taking its possibilities and limitations into account, an awareness of the vulnerabilities of satcom systems is needed. In this report, we study technical deficiencies and vulnerabilities that a satcom system may have, and which may affect the robustness of the communication. We also briefly discuss vulnerabilities related to commercial factors or to methods and scenario. We also study some types of protection measures that may increase robustness. One conclusion is that it is not sufficient to study a single link when studying the robustness, but the communication capability needs to be addressed as a whole. That means among other things that a platform should not be studied individually, but rather be seen as a part of a network. It also means that the systems used for redundancy should be considered. It is important that they are functioning, that the personnel is trained in how to use them, and that applications are designed to be used with different types of transmission systems. Another conclusion is that during procurement of systems with some kind of protection measures, the actual protection ability should be considered and not just the specifications of the equipment. An example is a modem with jamming protection. If the available bandwidth is limited, that can severely limit the protection performance, as compared to the modem specifications. With the satellite resources that are available today, we judge that the robustness of the Swedish use of satcom is low. The technical development that allows transmissions of more types of services over satcom, and the installation of satcom on additional platforms, infer strong reasons that more robust satcom is needed.