Interoperability remains the greatest challenge to effective emergency operations—and a host of innovators are working to solve its problems.
In New York City, police helicopter pilots screamed warnings into their radios for firefighters to evacuate the Twin Towers—to no avail. At Columbine High School and in Oklahoma City, responders had to use runners to convey vital information amidst a shooting spree and a catastrophic bombing. Public safety officials were reduced to yelling across rising floodwaters because of incompatible radio systems when the Ohio River flooded in 1997.
In an age where we take rapid technological advancements and global communications for granted, it’s strange to realize that most of our law enforcement, firefighters and rescue personnel lack the ability to communicate with each other in an emergency simply because of incompatible technologies. Interoperability, the ability of public safety agencies to effectively talk to one another in real time, still remains a huge issue in the post-Sept. 11, 2001 era, threatening public safety and leading to an unnecessary loss of life in critical situations.
While national emergencies bring the issue of non-interoperability into sharper focus, the hard truth is that such capabilities are needed on a daily basis to handle fires, missing children reports, rescue attempts, etc. Why, then, are we still faced with inadequate organization and incompatible equipment?
“These disparate public safety systems evolved since the late 1940s and were added to and revamped as time went on to suit the particular needs of the agencies involved,” said John Facella, public safety marketing director for Tyco Electronics’ M/A-COM Inc. business unit in Lowell, Mass. “Some people don’t understand that the missions of various public safety agencies and, therefore, the tools including communications that they use are often different. A rural volunteer ambulance squad just running basic life support has different communications needs than a big city paramedic ambulance system. Rural county sheriffs operate differently from—and have different issues they encounter than—suburban police departments, which are different again from state highway patrol. Providing interoperability among these many systems on different bands and technologies can be accomplished, but it takes time and planning.”
A February 2003 report titled Why Can’t We Talk? by the National Task Force on Interoperability (http://pulse.tiaonline. org/uploads/NTFIreport.pdf) estimated that there are approximately “2.5 million public safety first responders in the United States working for 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies, 26,000 fire departments and over 6,000 rescue departments, plus federal and tribal law enforcement and other agencies, such as federal and state emergency management, transportation and the public utilities who need to talk to one another during critical incidents.”
Since most of these agencies have their own radio systems, the most frequently discussed solution to the problem has been to suggest scrapping and replacing the millions of radios and radio systems used by first responders. The new systems would have to operate on a common frequency, bandwidth and protocol -- an extremely unlikely scenario. Even if it were feasible, a study undertaken by the consulting firm Booz Allen & Hamilton estimates that it would cost approximately $18.3 billion for the hardware alone, requiring many years to implement on a national scale.
IP links
The Project 25 (P25) standard was established by the Telecommunications Industry Association and a number of public safety and federal agencies to bring about a common standard for first responders, homeland security and emergency response professionals. While P25-compliant systems are being increasingly adopted and deployed, a few pioneers are aiming to make interoperability a ground reality using other means.
Developed by Berwyn, Pa.-based Tyco Electronics, the NetworkFirst interoperability system can link independent radio systems over a private Internet protocol (IP) network, maximizing the use of existing radios, stations and sites without the need for new infrastructure. It accomplishes this by converting all the radio’s audio into digital packet data that’s transported over a private and secure wide-area network (WAN) using IP. The system can translate among various frequency bands and technologies to allow public safety communications to take place. It does this by putting an interface “gateway” at each radio system that might want to inter-communicate, with one end of the gateway talking back into the IP network using the common language of IP.
“Think of it as a sort of translator at a party of people from many nations,” said Facella. “A German person is talking to a group of people from Japan. The translator listens to the German words, translates them to Japanese, turns around and speaks Japanese. When the Japanese person responds, the translator does the same in reverse. It’s not a radio device by itself but, rather, a solution based on connecting various base stations in an intelligent way to provide for interoperability.”
The other end of the gateway is attached to a base station or mobile control station that “looks into” the local network and is on the appropriate frequency band and technology. The system has the ability to route information from one system to another, imbuing it with important attributes like priority, a critical factor.
“Some interoperability solutions are 30-year-old audio patches,” Facella stated. “They simply connect multiple channels together, but increase communications chaos because each of these channels have incumbent users who may not understand what has happened when a ‘patch’ is created. Other interoperability solutions borrow IP-based platforms designed originally for other purposes, like conferencing financial traders, and try to apply them to public safety. It doesn’t work because public safety organizations are paramilitary and, therefore, hierarchal in nature. You don’t have effective communications when you put chiefs, captains and patrol officers on one interoperability patch. NetworkFirst allows various talk groups to have differing priorities and allows for emergency calls to preempt others”
The NetworkFirst developers say the system was the first interoperability solution to be designated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a Qualified Anti-Terrorist Technology. The application can both store pre-planned interoperability scenarios such as hostage, HAZMAT, school incident and airplane down, or allow the dispatcher to configure it on the fly. It is scalable to millions of users. It’s currently being used in Denver, Colo., Maryland’s Eastern Shore (covering nine counties, 57 municipalities, three utilities and seven federal agencies), Oakland County, Michigan, the states of Pennsylvania and New York and other federal facilities, including the National Capital Region around Washington DC.
From walkie-talkie to LAN
Professors James Matthew and William Michalson at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass., are taking a different route. They believe that technology developed for US Army and Air Force walkie-talkies can be transferred to public safety to provide an economical solution to interoperability until it’s replaced by newer technologies.
Called distributed digital radio (DDR), the system transforms emergency radio systems into wireless local area networks (LANs). All of the new technology is incorporated into a handset that includes a speaker and microphone and plugs into the existing mobile radio. A user can speak into the handset, which uses the radio to broadcast the digital information as a set of tones. Any other emergency radio equipped with a similar handset can receive the tones and translate them back into sound, which is projected through a speaker in the handset. Since the wireless LAN operates on the emergency radio system’s existing licensed channels and uses its infrastructure, it makes interoperability easier.
“Each public safety agency, no matter how small, can turn their radio network into a wireless local area network. It takes the pressure off of forcing everyone to have a common-air-interface and places interoperability on the Ethernet/Internet—where it belongs,” said Matthew. “It retains the present infrastructure in the public safety agency, which makes it extremely affordable, available to all the public safety agencies and available today.”
Individual radios become nodes in a network, much as individual computers can be nodes in wireless network, receiving and transmitting packets of digital data and directing them to their destinations. Voice over IP technology, which is used to send phone calls over the Internet, is employed to encrypt transmissions and keep the network secure. Because the systems make use of existing mobile radios, those radios can be used as a back-up means of communication or can be used to communicate with radios that have not yet been equipped with the digital handsets.
“No special equipment, i.e., analog gateways, are needed at the scene of an incident to establish interagency interoperability,” Michalson pointed out. “Ad-hoc networks can be built to extend coverage into buildings, tunnels or mines.”
With the system still in the prototype stage, the team is currently negotiating with local officials in a few eastern Massachusetts communities and the Massachusetts State Police to create an interagency test bed for the new technology and to evaluate how well it performs in mock disasters.
VANs and vehicles
Vancouver, British Columbia-based In Motion Technology aims to supply vehicle area networks (VANs) for public safety organizations and first responders to solve the interoperability issue. The In Motion “onBoard Mobile Gateway” is a cognitive wireless system that turns vehicles into secure local area networks and is currently ready for use in a planned nationwide 700 MHz public safety network.
The system creates a VAN that supports multiple devices and applications simultaneously over any wireless network, automatically finding the most effective one available in order to send voice, video and data from a moving emergency vehicle. It can handle data from a full range of first responder devices, including laptops, electrocardiograms, surveillance cameras, radio frequency identification devices (RFID) and emergency vehicle diagnostic tools, and is currently deployed in more than 70 communities nationwide.
“The onBoard Mobile Gateway automatically senses and selects the best available network; so as long as one remains intact, the vehicle-area network remains connected to the outside world,” said Larry LeBlanc, chief technology officer of In Motion Technology. “In the event that all infrastructure is destroyed, co-located onBoard Mobile Gateways can detect each other and form mobile ad-hoc networks to provide vehicle-to-vehicle communications using a mesh topology. If one of the vehicles is equipped with a satellite transceiver, the other vehicles in the area can share that backhaul to gain access to the outside world.”
The system can also monitor the health of the mobile network and the vehicle location, helping public safety organizations improve response times. By consolidating WAN functionality in a rugged device bolted into and powered by the vehicle itself, agencies get both better communications and enhanced tactical awareness.
“With solutions based on laptops or other portable devices, agencies lose track of their vehicles when those devices are powered off or removed from the vehicle,” said Leblanc. “The onBoard Mobile Gateway has embedded GPS [global positioning system] capability so the position of the vehicle is never lost. As long as the vehicle has power, the system can provide remote access to video surveillance cameras to gain critical incident awareness, RFID sensors to track critical inventory items—for example, has the shotgun been removed from the police car?—other sensors, like contact closures, analog and digital inputs to track the status of emergency lights and sirens, et cetera, vehicle diagnostics to assess the health of the vehicle for both routine maintenance and tactical readiness reasons, like fuel levels, airbag deployment, et cetera.”
Currently, the system’s developers are looking to expand its use, from individual agencies to city and county-wide and larger regional operations, to more effectively manage their mobile resources.
Satellite solutions
Iridium Satellite LLC, based in Bethesda, Md., offers a satellite-based, wireless communications solution to the problem of interoperability. The largest commercial satellite constellation in the world, it consists of 66 low, earth-orbiting, cross-linked satellites operating as a fully meshed network. Each Iridium satellite is cross-linked to four others, creating a dynamic network in space—calls are routed among Iridium satellites without touching the ground, creating a highly secure and reliable connection. The cross-links are space-based, making the system particularly impervious to natural disasters, such as hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes, which can damage ground-based wireless towers.
“Disasters like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina have taught first responders that when landlines, cellular infrastructure and radio towers go down, satellite phones are the only reliable mode of communications,” said Greg Ewert, Iridium’s executive vice president. “The satellite communications services are already interoperable at present, with other first responder communications tools, including cellular and two-way land mobile radios (VHF, UHF and HF) when an interoperability platform is utilized.”
The company has teamed up with Raytheon’s JPS Communications, Raleigh, NC, to provide first responders with a fully interoperable communications service for use in disasters. The ACU-1000 system can interconnect up to 24 communications devices at a time, including those based on satellite communications, radio, cellular or land-based networks. Coupled with JPS radio over IP and voice over IP products, the ACU can be networked to provide multiple nodes for larger applications and for wide area interoperability systems.
“Iridium is most often used by first responders, but it can also be used for tracking and redirecting of important assets in an emergency, including critical supplies, vehicles and even personnel,” said Ewert.
Iridium’s solutions are currently being deployed in several North American air ambulance and medical transportation fleets and will be used to send automated tracking and text messaging services for the California Shock/Trauma Air Rescue fleet of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft.
Kits and WAVEs
A number of other organizations are also coming up with innovative solutions.
Cisco Systems Inc., San Jose, Calif., has developed Rapidly Deployable Communications and Network Relief Kits (NRKs) to facilitate interoperable communications for agencies responding to any type of catastrophe or crime. The NRK is a “network in a box” and is designed to be deployed in the first wave of a crisis where connectivity has been totally destroyed. Built into a large suitcase, the kit is designed to be easily assembled and can be plugged in to generators or car batteries. They allow first responders to get instant connectivity to satellite communications and can provide a network for relief workers for wireless on-site collaboration. The kits were tested during relief efforts for both the Pakistan earthquake of 2005 and the 2004 South Asia tsunami. A more lightweight version, the NRK2, is being developed.
WAVE is software that allows different groups such as fire, police, military and the Coast Guard to talk with each other no matter what kind of radio each department uses. It has been developed by Twisted Pair Solutions (TPS), Seattle, Wash., a company working to enable interoperability among first responders. The software enables interoperability with virtually any device from any manufacturer, allowing customers to leverage existing equipment without being locked into any specific radio, telephony or other hardware. TPS is targeting its product to the US Defense Deparment, federal agencies, the financial industry and emergency response teams. Current clients include special operations forces, the US Air Force, British Telecom and the US National Forest System.
How can one ensure that all these interoperable solutions offer secure communications?
Edmund Munger, chief technology officer of VirnetX Inc., Scotts Valley, Calif., and chief system architect for the FBI’s Counter Terrorism Data Warehouse Prototype, told HSToday, “Encryption needs to be at the Internet level. If application developers home cook their own encryption and security, there will never be interoperability between real time communication systems that will also provide good end-to-end security. An automatic standards based on an encrypted connection that supports multiple services in the stack of the operating systems and enables all communicating applications is the best approach for interoperability.”
Analysis
Many experts believe that technological limitations are not the only issue behind the challenges to interoperability. Most agencies have at least a minimum technological capability to achieve tactical interoperable communications, but seem to be hampered by using the technology during incident response.
“Actually, the technology solutions is only about 20 percent of the problem,” said Facella. “Eighty percent lies in getting the chiefs to agree on pre-planning these incidents where interoperability is needed on a larger scale, writing the [standard operating procedures] to document those plans and then practicing them. When DHS did their survey in January 2007 of 75 urban areas, they found many of the systems lacking in terms of leadership and strategic planning, testing and exercises.”
Phyllis Schneck, vice president of research integration at Secure Computing, San Jose, Calif., agreed. “Policy problems cannot be solved with technology, and ‘interoperability’ is a combination of a technology problem and a ‘people problem,’” she told HSToday. “Interoperability is not only a matter of technology that works together, but people and teams that work together. Government and private sector critical infrastructure owners, operators and creators need to agree on the requirements and functionality, as well as who will complete the task of creating interoperable systems. Progress is being made.”HST
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