Innovative Interoperability Answers

     Radio interoperability remains a pressing challenge for U.S. public safety agencies. Fortunately, the state of the art in this area has advanced significantly, allowing smaller departments to cost-effectively solve their problems and improve their communications capabilities. Here are two examples of innovative interoperable solutions in use today.

Tillamook Co.'s MCCV
     Located on the Oregon coast, Tillamook County covers 1,125 square miles, including 500,000 acres of national forest. With a population of about 25,380, it's a rural area, and its mix of lowland farms and rugged mountains presents real challenges to county emergency officials.

     To enhance its public safety communications, Tillamook County recently purchased a mobile command/communications vehicle (MCCV) from National Interop (www.nationalinterop.com). The MCCV is a truck-drawn trailer that serves two purposes: First, it can act as a field communications center for mutual aid incidents in rural and remote areas. Second, it is equipped with three call-taker dispatch positions, allowing it to replace a crippled dispatch center in a pinch.

     "We don't have a lot of radio repeater sites in our jurisdiction," says deputy Don Taylor of the Tillamook County Sheriff's Department. "The MCCV helps us bridge this RF gap. Thanks to its satellite uplink, we can connect to the Web for e-mail and other data. We can also use the MCCV to support RoIP."

     RoIP is Radio over IP, a version of Voice over IP. In layman's terms, RoIP allows different radio systems to interconnect to each other over a network, typically back at a central hub at headquarters. The MCCV connects to this hub by satellite, which allows it to seamlessly link all the different agencies responding to a situation. The result: instant interoperability, with a solid connection back to county offices.

     "RoIP has already taken the military by storm, but it's only just now moving into the public safety market," says David Billstrom, owner of National Interop. "It allows us to patch together disparate radio systems at the network level and create mutual aid talk groups on the fly. With RoIP, you don't have to take an audio bridge to the scene—everything can be handled back at your dispatch center."

     "We work with all kinds of different agencies in mutual aid situations, including the Coast Guard," says Taylor. "RoIP gives us the ability to communicate with them and other agencies quickly and easily."

     One interesting point: Tillamook County's MCCV has enough onboard battery power to run all systems for more than three hours before needing connection to exterior power. This allows the unit to start operations within 10 minutes of arrival, without losing time connecting and activating generators.

     So how did Tillamook County select National Interop? As it turns out, company employees are also part of a group of rescue volunteers who bring assistance and ham radio communications to mountain incidents. "We see them at a lot of rescues," Taylor says. "We got to talking about Tillamook County's communications needs and asked for their advice. As it turns out, National Interop had built a good reputation for its work for other public-safety agencies. That's why we decided to give them a try."

     Today, radio communications have been vastly improved in Tillamook County, thanks to their new MCCV. "It was a good choice," says Taylor. "The MCCV is working well for us."

Westford Fire Department's AWINS
     Located in historic Westford, MA, the Westford Fire Department (WFD) can trace its roots back to 1892—that was when the town hired its first forest fire wardens. Its first three fire stations followed the next year.

     Today, the WFD is an up-to-date department with modern needs, including better mutual aid communications with the nearby towns of Ashland, Beverly and Lawrence. As a result, WFD Chief Richard Rochon and his colleagues began examining interoperability solutions. They chose ARINC's AWINS (www.arinc.com).

     "The ARINC solution was suited to systems such as ours," says Rochon. "We particularly like that it consists of off-the-shelf components that are affordable and accessible."

     AWINS, which is short for ARINC Wireless Interoperability Network Solutions, is a suite of open-standards applications that can interconnect disparate voice, data and video systems into one interoperable solution—all while allowing users to keep their existing equipment. Rather than requiring services to scrap their conflicting technologies for one standard radio product, AWINS simply "glues" them all together electronically over a shared IP network. This means they can communicate via radio or telephone without hassle.

     "AWINS helps solve the age-old issue of communicating across disparate systems without forklift upgrades and making the first responders change their response behaviors," says Tony Rosela, senior program manager for ARINC (www.arinc.com). "With voice, for example, various radio systems—such as UHF, VHF, 450 MHz, 800 MHz, analog digital, conventional or trunked systems—can be integrated into a Cisco integrated services router through the Cisco land mobile radio gateway."

     In this approach, voice traffic signals (radio or telephone) from these systems are digitized by the LMR gateway, loaded onto the IP network and then transported to wherever the packets are destined. "We can also integrate typical public switched telephone network lines, Nextel push-to-talk handsets and audio sources such as weather radio stations and repeat broadcasts," Rosela adds. "Now add native IP devices such as desktops, IP telephone systems and laptops, and all of these devices can communicate with each other. And with the power, breadth and speed of IP networks today, these devices can be interoperable with a national reach."

     Rather than develop its own command and control interface for managing the AWINS system via computer, ARINC implemented Cisco's IP Interoperability and Collaboration Suite (IPICS) to control the creation, activation and deactivation of virtual talk groups (VTGs). "With IPICS, the properly credentialed user can add and create ad hoc or activate preplanned VTGs based on need," says Rosela. "The VTGs can make interoperable any resource integrated within the system that's not currently in use by another talk group. Using drag and drop functionality within the Web-based GUI [graphical user interface] application, IPICS can drag defined users, systems and channels into groups. These groups can be activated and deactivated as needed."

     Physically, the network tying together Westford and its three sister sites is connected via redundant T1 lines. If one path is lost, the system automatically reroutes traffic over another. Each site has its mutual aid radios integrated within a Cisco 2811 ISR, with a desktop computer and IP telephones as a part of their equipment. "Each of the sites can act as a backup emergency operations center or serve as a major incident command center for the other," Rosela notes. "In a case where one site becomes unsuitable for operations, they can move to another site and resume radio communications with the responders on the street."

     For the WFD and its neighboring departments, AWINS has proven to be an affordable solution, and less disruptive than trying to put everyone on a common radio platform.

     "Right now we have four fire control positions connected together, which is our Phase 1 deployment," says Rochon. "For Phase 2, we're adding more frequencies and talk groups, while Phase 3 will see microwave links added to connect us to other fire and EMS services in New England, as well as 128 law enforcement agencies."

Conclusion
     The interoperability solutions chosen by Tillamook County and the Westford Fire Department show that departments can be interconnected while retaining their existing radio hardware. In the same way that incompatible PCs, Macs and Unix computers can communicate via the Internet, incompatible radio systems can communicate via a shared IP network. This is a lesson worth noting for agencies still struggling with their own interoperability challenges: You don't have to throw out your old radios to solve your problems.

James Careless is a freelance journalist with extensive experience covering public-safety communications issues.