Performance Analysis of Different Commercial Communications Technologies in Hybrid Communications Architectures

Future military communications will rely on a variety of communications technologies, both proprietary and commercial, that are integrated together with the goal of realizing a reliable and robust hybrid communications architecture. To this end, it is useful to measure the performance characteristics of different commercial communications technologies in the context of a hybrid communications architecture. This paper examines a subset of some of the newer communications technologies, including 5G, mmWave 5G, SpaceX Starlink, and Airbus OneWeb, and various combinations of these technologies. Initial experiments were performed to measure the latency and capacity of these different technologies in the context of different compositions of these technologies. This paper describes the hybrid architectures that were set up and the performance results that were obtained.