The invisible backbone: Data links in the age of unmanned warfare

Bharati Exicom's role and contribution across the unmanned industry, spanning airborne platforms, ground nodes and marine nodes on one secure network

Unmanned Systems: The New Centre of Gravity in Modern Warfare

Unmanned equipment has moved from the margins of military planning to the very centre of it. Across every recent conflict, unmanned aerial vehicles, ground robots and uncrewed surface vessels have emerged as among the most powerful and lethal instruments on the battlefield, and among the most cost-effective. A system costing a few lakh rupees can find, fix and destroy an asset worth hundreds of crores.

The importance is felt across all three domains. In the air, unmanned platforms now deliver persistent surveillance, precision strike and loitering-munition mass, providing airpower without the airframe cost. On the ground, unmanned ground vehicles carry sensors and lethal payloads into spaces too dangerous for troops, from high-altitude posts to urban clearances. At sea, uncrewed surface and sub-surface vessels are redefining littoral security and maritime strike. The common thread: lethal effect, delivered cheaply, at scale.

The Inexpensive Lethal Weapon, and the Systems Built to Stop It

Every major military has reached the same conclusion: the drone is an inexpensive, lethal weapon whose role is to detect, identify and kill. And because every military has reached that conclusion, every military is now fielding counter-unmanned systems designed to break the kill chain before it completes. These counter systems rest on three main mechanisms:

• Thermal and heat-signature detection: electro-optical and infrared sensors that find the platform by the heat it radiates.
• RF detection and interception: electronic-support sensors that find, fingerprint and intercept the radio link between the platform and its operator, then jam or hijack it.
• GPS jamming and spoofing: denying or falsifying satellite navigation so the platform loses its way, loiters blind, or is captured intact.

Why Drones Fail: The Data Link Is the Weakest Link

When unmanned missions have failed in recent conflicts, the post-mortem has pointed, again and again, to the same component: the data link.

A conventional communication link is vulnerable because it is easy to detect, easy to intercept and easy to kill. The moment the link dies, the most sophisticated platform in the world becomes an expensive projectile with no eyes and no ears.

Both sides of this contest are learning the technology every single day. The counter-UAS operator refines detection; the unmanned operator refines evasion. In such an environment, a data-link radio designed for yesterday's threat is already obsolete.

The radio must be adaptable and built for the future: hardware that is futuristic by design, able to adapt and upgrade its features in the field, so that critical transmissions remain secure, robust and sovereign for the life of the platform.

A platform is only as survivable as its link. In unmanned warfare, the data link is not an accessory; it is the mission.

What Makes a Data Link Futuristic?

Four attributes separate a future-ready tactical data link from a commodity radio:

• A true Software Defined Radio: a multi-mission, multi-mode and multi-role radio that connects all endpoints on a single network, with capability delivered in software and upgraded over the platform's life.
• An in-country waveform: a nationally developed and controlled waveform that keeps the network secure and closes off every class of vulnerability that comes with foreign-controlled protocol stacks.
• Multi-mission, multi-domain readiness: one radio family connecting air, land and sea nodes on a single network, without compromising the security or the credibility of the link on any of them.
• High data rates: the throughput to move real-time high-speed video, critical mission data and real-time navigation information simultaneously, because a modern unmanned mission is a data-heavy mission.

Why Bharati Exicom

Bharati Exicom Technologies has spent close to a decade working shoulder-to-shoulder with the Indian unmanned industry, such as end users, DRDO laboratories, development agencies and platform OEMs, bridging the gap between the technology available and the need and requirement of the hour. The result speaks on the flight line: today, most unmanned platforms flying in India carry a Bharati Exicom radio. Bharati Exicom data links fly on airborne platforms, ride on ground nodes and sail on marine nodes, holding all three domains on one transparent, low-probability-of-intercept network. What Bharati Exicom brings to the futuristic-data-link standard:

• Future-ready, multi-waveform SDR architecture. Air, soldier, vehicular and maritime domains each face different physics, ranges and threats; no radio built on one waveform can serve them all. Bharati Exicom's true SDR platform carries multiple waveforms, including dual-waveform, dual-band operation, with the adaptability to add Indian sovereign encryption over its life.
• Military-band operation. UHF, L, S and C band options, clear of the congested commercial ISM spectrum that modern QRs disqualify.
• Self-forming, self-healing IP mesh (MANET). Every node a relay, no single point of failure, survivable under electronic warfare. Multi-hop extends the network far beyond line of sight, and swarm architectures are natively supported.
• Cognitive, self-aware networking. Every radio is a sensor. Each node reports local noise and interference to build a live, distributed spectrum-intelligence picture, and the network shifts frequencies across the whole formation automatically, thereby sensing, interpreting, analysing and acting without operator intervention.
• Spectrum-overmatch toolkit. Wideband adaptive FHSS that spreads the signal until it appears as background noise; LPI / LPD / LPE operation with AES 256-bit encryption; split TX/RX frequency operation to defeat responsive jammers; and silent mode to defeat direction finding at launch.
• GNSS-denied operations. RF ranging with approximately 20 m positioning built into the radio itself: no GPS, no extra hardware, mission continuity even under full satellite-navigation denial.
• Proven performance envelope. UxV data links fielded from 1 to 150 km, video downlink reach to 200 km, high-capacity backhaul to 4 Gbps and mesh throughput up to 80 Mbps, TRANSEC and COMSEC compliant, validated by years of recce across high-altitude, desert, jungle and marine theatres.
• An Indian industrial base. Indian enclosures, antennas, RF amplification and mission software; MIL-STD-810 environmental and JSS 55555 / MIL-STD-461 EMI-EMC qualification; and a nationwide L3 support and repair network.

A Roadmap Aligned with Government of India Policy

Bharati Exicom's product roadmap is deliberately built in line with the Government of India's policy direction: AatmaNirbhar Bharat, indigenous design and sovereign control of critical communication technology.

• Design in India, Design for India: engineered by Indian teams for India's environmental conditions, where the terrain and the equipment requirement change every five hundred kilometres.
• Waveform-open hardware, very close to release: a hardware platform ready to adopt a third-party waveform, enabling dual-waveform operation on a single radio.
• India-specific waveform tuning: tweaking and hardening of the waveform so that it is Indian-specific in its hopping behaviour, spectrum use and threat assumptions.
• SAG-approved cryptography: a clear path to cryptography approved by India's Scientific Analysis Group (SAG), giving end users sovereign assurance over every encrypted bit.

Why Bharati Exicom's Radio

Because in unmanned warfare, the platform is replaceable; the link is not. Bharati Exicom offers the Indian unmanned industry a data link that is software defined, multi-waveform and future-adaptable; secured with AES-256 today and sovereign, SAG-approved cryptography on the roadmap; meshed, cognitive and self-healing so there is no single point to kill; wideband and spectrum-aware so it hops away from detection and keeps navigating even when GPS is denied; fast enough for real-time video, audio and navigation at once; proven on air, ground and marine nodes across Indian terrain; and built, supported and continuously upgraded in India, for India.

One network. Every domain. Sovereign by design.

The author is CEO, Exicom Technologies India. He brings over 20 years of experience in wireless technology and played a key role in building high-performing teams, driving cross-functional collaboration, and maintaining a strong customer-focused approach; Views presented are personal.