Re: radio net (fwd); RAND '64

[David Honig <honig@sprynet.com>]

On a radio data network: 

See http://www.rand.org/publications/RM/RM3762/


In this Memorandum we consider something we have earlier referred to as
"poor-boy" microwave. The "poor-boy" designation resulted from an imposed
constraint on the design of an ensemble of microwave communications
equipments--namely, that the designer should have to pay for the system out
of his own pocket! Even so, a look at price tags for anything to do with
any large electronic or communications system would appear to render the
term "poor-boy" inappropriate. "Mini-cost," a contraction of
"minimum-cost," now seems more fitting.

Mini-cost microwave, therefore, is a minimum-cost, line-of-sight microwave
communications system designed to transmit digital information in as
inexpensive a manner as possible. It is one way of building the links for
the proposed Distributed Adaptive Message Block communications system with
which this series of Memoranda is concerned.

The distributed system itself is designed around digital modulation, using
redundant paths selected on an instant-by-instant basis. The communications
links for such a system can be built in a different manner than their
equivalents in today's systems, taking advantage of the system's less rigid
distortion level and tandem reliability requirements. The fundamental
objective for the system's links is that they permit formation of new
routes cheaply (a necessary survivability criterion), yet allow
transmission on the order of millions of bits per second (see ODC-I,
-VII[1]); system reliability and a low raw error rate are secondary. And,
since future networks conveying military traffic must be designed with the
expectation of heavy damage, powerful digital error detection and error
removal methods have been built into the system.