The State of Interoperability 10 Years After 9/11
By Ronald J. Levine, Chief, Foothill-De Anza College District Police, & David E. Kahn, CEO, Covia Labs Inc.
Foothill PD
The World Trade Center tragedy on Sept. 11, 2001, provided the country with a dramatic visualization of the inadequacies of deployed public safety communications systems to enable emergency responders from different agencies to communicate with each other, even when responding to the same incident. Even though the New York Police Department had received word that the buildings were unstable and in danger of collapsing, firefighters at the same scene were not notified that their lives were at risk, which caused many preventable deaths. Now, nearly 10 years later, the challenge of communications interoperability continues to vex the brave men and women in the front lines of public safety.
Subsequent to 9/11, public safety settled on the Project 25 (P25) standard for digital voice communications. The current generation of P25 LMR uses 12.5 kHz per channel instead of the 25 kHz per channel used by analog radios. Consequently, narrowband digital radios double the number of channels for the same spectrum. Public safety organizations have been given until Jan. 1, 2013, to switch entirely to 12.5 kHz narrow-band, and the FCC has stated that “Agencies that do not meet the deadline face the loss of communication capabilities.” (1) In Phase II of the narrowband initiative, the FCC will require public safety to once again halve the bandwidth to 6.25 kHz per channel.
With All Its Flaws P25 Is a Necessary Bridging Technology
P25 radio systems use 2,400 bits per second for signaling capabilities, which include selective calling (source and destination ID), talk groups (TGID), network (repeater) access codes (NAC) and emergency flags. P25 signaling also allows manufacturers to have their own IDs, so that each can customize their radios’ capabilities while remaining compatible with other manufacturers’ equipment. Unfortunately, custom capabilities are sometimes experienced as incompatibilities by public safety users.
Approximately 50 countries are using, or plan to use, equipment that is interoperable with the P25 standard. Since P25 communication trunks use Internet Protocol (IP) addressing, standard network routers are able to provide interoperable communications between agencies using the P25 standard. Unfortunately, the P25 standard has limitations that frustrate and disappoint public safety personnel.
First, the reduction in voice quality from 25 kHz analog LMR to 12.5 kHz P25 systems is considerable, even when the signal is unencrypted. Voice quality degrades further when encryption is turned on, and likely will degrade even further when the bandwidth is reduced to 6.25 kHz as will be required in Phase 2 of the FCC narrowband program.
Unfortunately, P25 radio voice intelligibility does not degrade gracefully when there is interference or when reflections off natural and man-made structures create multiple paths from the transmitting to receiving device. Consequently, in situations where older analog systems would have static, but the voice would still be intelligible, P25 radios are often useless. In several cases police, fire or EMS personnel have rejected the P25 radios as having unacceptable performance.
Second, as the Wall Street Journal reported on Aug. 10, 2011, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania discovered that commonly used P25 radios had significant vulnerabilities (2):
“Their research also shows that the radios can be effectively jammed using a pink electronic child’s toy and that the standard used by the radios “provides a convenient means for an attacker” to continuously track the location of a radio’s user.”
In their full report at the 20th Usenix Security Symposium the researcher observed (3):
“We implemented a complete receiver and exciter for an effective P25 jammer by installing custom firmware in a $15 toy “instant messenger” device marketed to pre-teen children.” [Emphasis added]
Despite these limitations, P25 radios are likely to be the only game in town starting January 1, 2013. Meanwhile, broadband LTE fourth generation (4G) wide-band systems are being rolled out by the major U.S. cellular carriers for their commercial networks, as well as being offered directly to public safety organizations by Motorola, LGS/Alcatel-Lucent and other large vendors. LTE could be as much as 10 times faster than existing Third-Generation (3G) networks, which would allow powerful access to data, and eventually even mission critical voice over wideband.
Covia Labs was recently awarded a U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology contract to explore ways to provide mission critical voice over LTE. The project is titled “Pragmatic Plan to Deploy and Evolve an LTE-Centric Mission Critical Mobile Voice System.”
The word “pragmatic” is important because current LTE equipment is not ready to support all of the requirements of public safety. Therefore, LTE systems — both hardware and software — will necessarily evolve, which will force vendors and users to make numerous, hopefully pragmatic, choices while waiting for the hoped for 4G wide-band “nirvana.” If one accepts that existing LTE systems cannot provide acceptable mission critical voice, several conclusions become inescapable.
P25 Voice Will Be Part of the Landscape for Years, Perhaps for As Long As a Decade
Love them or hate them, P25 radios were designed to provide voice capabilities that are absolutely essential to public safety personnel and the public they protect. Lives depend on them. A half watt LTE smartphone is never going to match the range of five watt P25 handheld or 50 watt mobile radios. Therefore, unless the FCC allows public safety to increase the power of LTE devices or micro LTE “towers” such as LGS/Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio™ cubes become ubiquitous, public safety personnel will need to carry two devices, a P25 radio on one hip and an LTE smartphone on the other.
We will all benefit if P25 LMR and LTE smartphones seamlessly work together in the short-term. They should share a single chest or ear microphone and automatically transmit over the LTE radio when it has connectivity and over the P25 radio when only it can be heard. The digital data capabilities of P25 radios, which are slow and currently largely unused, should be made capable of transmitting data normally sent over broad-band LTE. For example, transmitting the location of personnel (i.e., Blue Force Tracking) would certainly not overtax P25’s digital data channel.
Motorola has developed a clever feature whereby P25 LMR and LTE smartphones automatically “pair,” i.e., setup a connection, just by tapping them together. However, much more software needs to be written to turn P25 and LTE devices into productive partners. Ideally, whatever is developed should allow hardware from different vendors to work together.
Public Systems Need to Evolve. Focusing On Standards Could Be Counterproductive
Perhaps there exist individuals who have the foresight to see all of the requirements for public safety’s voice, data and 9-1-1 systems over the next five, 10 or 20 years. However, in the absence of that, it is feasible to create a software foundation that provides interoperability, security, and scalability, while providing maximum flexibility and adaptability.
When we attempt to define the standards for the next generation system, they are often obsolete before being fully implemented. Consider the 20+ years it took to develop P25 LMR. What was a fabulous idea in 1989 is perceived by many public safety professionals as a straightjacket in 2011.
One notable exception to this “obsolete before implemented” phenomenon is the IP standard. What has made IP so powerful is that it is simple, flexible, and (at least after a revision or two) unambiguous. IP was successful because of a combination of genius and luck. LGS/Alcatel-Lucent claims that there has never been a case where IP went up against another technology and IP lost. Public safety systems will greatly benefit from using the IP standard in its 4G LTE systems.
What If You Didn’t Need To Define Standards Before Having Systems Face The Real World?
It is rare for systems to be perfect out of the shoot. In general, we don’t know the exact needs of users until they get a chance to use the systems. Even with accurate prediction of user needs, it would be a miracle for initial implementations to perfectly satisfy those needs. So why not design an architecture that allows updating fundamental capabilities without breaking existing hardware? It may sound infeasible, but in fact, it is easier to implement than to pursue the illusory goal of creating perfect standards.
What is needed is a run-time engine that can be installed on each device, and that is customized to expose all of the capabilities of the device. Covia Labs has developed an implementation of this software that is called the Connector. Connectors guarantee distribution and adaptation to the capabilities of each device by the second part of the system, which are called Connected Applications. Since the code running on every device comes from a single executable, you can be absolutely certain that both sides of every connection have the same executable code, and hence always understand what the other device is doing and the format of the data they are receiving. The Connector technology is currently in-process for the FIPS 140-2 encryption certification by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and was awarded a “Top Performing Technology” designation at the DoD’s Coalition Warrior Interoperability Demonstrations (CWID) in 2010.
Foothill-De Anza College Trials
Foothill-De Anza College is one of the largest community college districts in the United States. Foothill-De Anza provides credit classes for about 43,000 students per quarter on its two campuses. Located in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, its staff unsurprisingly is a leader in using advanced hardware and software to protect its students, faculty and staff and to maintain order. Since late 2010, Chief Levine, his sworn officers, and dispatchers have been using Covia Labs’ software to provide improved Command and Control and situational awareness.
The trial started off using standard PCs running Windows in the dispatch center, and HTC smartphones running Windows Mobile 6.5 with 3G connectivity. As faster smartphones were released, the system migrated to the iPhone 3GS and later to iPhone 4’s (both having 3G data connectivity), and finally settled on Android smartphones with LTE data connectivity.
In other words, during the one year of the trial, devices were changed four times, operating systems were changed three times, and the cellular protocol was changed once. Yet the Alert & Respond Connected application we were testing never once had to be recompiled and reinstalled to support any of these changes. Moreover, updates were automatically distributed, adding new feature capabilities, while remaining compatible with earlier versions.
The campus public safety personnel now have access to a military grade C2ISR (Command & Control Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) with FIPS-140-2 encryption (in-process) that supports a secure enclave mission-based security model which has proved ideal for the Foothill-DeAnza police force to temporarily share information with other public safety agencies for the duration of an incident. For example, when major political figures, such as Tony Blair or Condoleezza Rice, come to Foothill-De Anza’s campuses, officers were able to share information with their security details as well as with federal agencies, such as the FBI, and other state and local agencies. Since this is done using the same Command and Control and situational awareness system that is used every day, personnel do not need to be trained on an unfamiliar system for one-off events.
Conclusion
So where does communications interoperability stand 10 years after 9/11? Not much further than we were on Sept. 10, 2001. As Congress considers passing the much needed D Block authorization, there is hope for the future. But implementation of the plans envisioned under the national broadband network for public safety will take at least a decade to implement. In the meantime, we can equip officers with a very effective system composed of two devices: a cellular smartphone that enables the sharing of rich media that can transform the way law enforcement is conducted (photo, video, compass, location awareness, memory, maps, etc.), and an analog or P25 device that guarantees communications when personnel are out of range of the commercial cellular network.
Authors
- Ron Levine, Chief of Police of the Foothill-DeAnza CCD Police Department, and President of the California College and University Police Chief’s Association. With almost 40 years in public safety, Levine is an expert in the use of technology in law enforcement.
- David Kahn, CEO of Covia Labs, which is currently under contract with the U.S Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate’s (S&T) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program to research and develop public safety mobile broadband applications for mission critical voice.
References
