Commercial SATCOM communications protection: Commercial SATCOM resilience to jamming

Commercial satellite communications are occasionally targeted by jamming for political/ideological reasons or suffer the effects of accidental interference. Jamming is rare enough that it is generally considered a tolerable business risk. Traditionally the threat has not been preemptively mitigated with anti-jam technologies. Instead, instances of jamming are dealt with reactively. Specialized commercial services locate the jammer and negotiations are used to persuade the instigator to cease the jamming activity. Although commercial business decisions have not driven broad implementation of anti-jam technologies low risk features are available. The last decade has seen an evolution of a new suite of commercial satellite communication systems. Driven to maximize the service providers' return on investment the systems increase the number of subscribers served within the limited bandwidth resource for relatively small growth in capital expense. Key to the exponential gains in capacity are technology enhancements at all layers of the protocol stack. Although developed to optimize a business case these technologies provide features that inherently provide resilience to interference, increase link availability, and with reasonable modification may be enhanced further to increase the resilience to jamming. This paper identifies features of modern commercial satellite systems relevant to assuring communications in a contested environment.