MIT 2009 Volume: 13 Issue: 8 (September)
First Responder Interoperability
P25 Waveform Porting Project Seeks to
Enable Military Radios to Communicate
with State and Local Agencies.
Editor’s Note: This is another in a regular series of updates on the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS), as provided by the program’s Joint Program Executive Office (JPEO).
The JPEO JTRS has begun work on a Project 25 (P25) waveform porting project in conjunction with the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) facility. The effort represents the first phase of a three-phased approach by the JPEO JTRS designed to allow military radios to interoperate with emergency and first responder agencies.
Phase one of this project has the UCSD engineers utilizing the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) and JTRS application program interfaces to initially implement P25 in a software simulation. Next, they will port the waveform to a COTS development platform, which will then lead to a demonstration of RF end-to-end functionality. Finally, the team will demonstrate interoperability with commercial P25 radios, simulating military interoperability with COTS first responder radios running the P25 waveform.
The Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials-International (APCO) is the world’s largest organization dedicated to public safety telecommunications. Formerly called APCO-25, P25 is now a joint effort between APCO, Telecommunications Industry Association, National Association of State Telecommunications Directors and various federal agencies. P25 concerns the development of standards for digital telecommunications technology, including an objective to determine consensus standards for digital radio equipment embracing elements of interoperability, spectrum efficiency and cost economies.
“This is a crucial step towards making JTRS radios interoperable with first responders,” said Richard North, technical director for JPEO JTRS. “Phase two will be to port the UCSD-developed APCO-25 waveform onto a JTRS radio with additional modes, which may include encryption, trunking and analog FM. Both phase one and phase two are risk-mitigation efforts before moving to the third and final phase.”
Phase three of the project will be the incorporation of the P25 into the JTRS program of record, which provides the management and funding mechanism required to deliver the radio to the military end-users.
Interoperability for a first responder participant requires that public safety agencies (fire, police, medical) have direct communications when they operate with one another, across disciplines and jurisdictions. In order to facilitate this communication goal, agencies are looking at non-military waveform standards such as P25.
Using a standardized suite of waveform standards allows radio sets manufactured by different vendors to communicate. Ultimately, porting the P25 waveform to JTRS radios will allow military organizations to interoperate with state and local agencies in time of an emergency such as a disaster relief scenario.
“The JTRS radios will host the ported P25 waveform as well as JTRS networking and current force military waveforms such as SINCGARS, EPLRS, HF, Link-16 or UHF SATCOM,” North added. “With all these waveforms on the same radio, we can provide direct communications to P25-equipped first responders, as well as routing and retransmitting messages from the P25 net to current force radios. This provides a tremendous capability for unit commanders equipped with JTRS radios.”
The UCSD division of Calit2 and Calit2’s division at UC Irvine together house more than 1,000 researchers across the two campuses, organized around more than 50 projects. With a focus on discovery and innovation at the intersection of science, engineering and the arts, Calit2 constitutes one of the largest multidisciplinary research centers in the nation. Research is conducted on the future of telecommunications and information technology and using these advancing technologies to transform a range of applications.
The Calit2/JTRS Software Defined Radio (SDR) Project is a collaborative research effort supported by JPEO JTRS involving SCA SDR platforms for development and porting of SDR waveforms, creating a high-performance amplifier test-bed, and hosting the JTRS Open Information Repository. More information is available at http://jtrs. calit2.net. ♦
