Bringing VoIP to the Field

Written by Tom Marlowe

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phones offer military units the potential to deploy one network for data and voice communications, streamlining operations and saving money while providing versatile services. But although the Department of Defense has been using VoIP technologies for five years or more, piecemeal adoption has left various parts of U.S. military forces with different technologies.

Because it’s imperative to make certain that those technologies are secure and work well together, warfighters participate in exercises such as the Joint Users Interoperability Communications Exercise (JUICE), held by the Army Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM) Lifecycle Management Command at Fort Monmouth, N.J.

The latest exercise, which occurred in June, examined how to manage various communications technologies and thereby make phone calls from one kind of device to another, according to John Caruso, chief of the Executive Agent for Theater Joint Tactical Networks (EA-TJTN).

“It takes a look at the operational gaps that exist in the field and the shortfalls out there,” Caruso said of JUICE. “We basically put together a network and make sure we have the right mix of communications to take a look at some of these gaps. It’s a real-world network. It has real-word services just as if it were deployed, and we put together pieces of it replicating issues and problems in the field to take a look at technologies, techniques and procedures.”

This year, JUICE focused on supporting the warfighter in NATO and coalition forces and addressing communications gaps across various technologies as well as testing interoperability between members of Joint Task Forces. Within those areas, JUICE examined power requirements and beyond-line-of-sight systems. VoIP phones, in particular, have power requirements above and beyond traditional telephones.

“One of the gaps that existed is that a commander goes into the field and has six different phones sitting in front of him. Who you are talking to depends on which one you pick up,” Caruso described.

“We put together a network with the cooperation of a lot of people, where a commander can go into a field with a Global System for Mobile [GSM] cell phone and get into all of those networks. We are trying to show you can bridge the different networks that exist out there today with the equipment in the field. It doesn’t require the purchase of anything else; it’s just engineering,” he said.

Matching DoD requirements, JUICE participants made use of a session initiation protocol (SIP) that permitted translation between different networks. The exercise went well and callers successfully made calls between secure and nonsecure phones as well as phones that delivered Voice over IP and those that didn’t.

Indeed, the goal of reaching joint secure voice interoperability involved the use of radio over IP, cellular, GSM, Iridium, Voice over secure IP (VoSIP), VoIP, GSM, and the Defense Red Switch Network (DRSN).

“We had an IPv6 session going on with real IPv6 addresses, not contrived ones. We had an up-and-running IPv6 network, and we did voice, data and video over it, which has probably never been done before. We had IPv6 encrypters,” Caruso reported.Mp> CECOM will generate a final report with empirical data on communicating across those technologies. Caruso and his team will identify technologies that may be useful in bridging those gaps and thus require certification from the Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC). EATJTN will build upon those results for next year’s exercise to provide an evolution in the exercise scenario.

Some of the most interesting results come from unplanned facets of JUICE. For example, this year’s exercise involved forces from the regular Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force, as well as from the National Guard. The National Guard used Army radios to communicate, which was an unanticipated wrinkle in the exercise. But it went smoothly, and participants were encouraged about their capability to bring others into the exercise.

“The theme this year was bridging the gaps. We will probably look at that again next year, but we will expand JUICE even further to bring in more of the civil support people,” Caruso said.

ISLANDS OF COMMUNICATION

One of the approved technologies that JUICE made use of was the TRANSip IP telephony technology suite, which is a full VoIP solution that provides interoperability between time division multiplexing (TDM) and IP technologies from REDCOM Laboratories Inc. REDCOM has taken great care in the development of its products to make certain that it does not leave communications gaps between those using new and old equipment, according to Dinah Gueldenpfennig, REDCOM vice president of planning and government program administration.

“IP is a highly desirable technology due to its ability to transmit everything over one medium,” Gueldenpfennig stated. “VoIP is also still a push technology. It has a lot of nice features, but you still have a lot of legacy equipment that is in use, and you cannot simply rip out and replace immediately. Part of that is due to costs but it’s also due to logistics. Imagine somebody that is in theater with an effort going on and then he’s told he has to change out his equipment.”

So while VoIP offers a leap forward in communications capabilities, warfighters must also continue to communicate with those who do not have VoIP. REDCOM’s switches with TRANSip, a technology that provides VoIP and TDM combined, enables military users to place calls “from the foxhole to the Pentagon,” Gueldenpfennig said.

The use of such a technology eliminates the need for everyone along a single line of communications to upgrade to the same device, she added. “You don’t want to do a rip and replace. It’s easier if you provide a product that you can adapt as you transition from one technology to another without abandoning islands of one type of technology so you preserve your investment.”

In addition to providing versatile and rugged hardware, REDCOM supports its products with secure applications such as secure conferencing.

The company is participating in the AS-SIP pilot program with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to test implementation of assured services SIP. AS-SIP meets requirements for establishing communication with resource priorities, ensuring system and network access and control, and providing precedence and pre-emption policies to assure connectivity for command and control.

“While the goal is full interoperability and connectivity, there are islands of communication that are Voice over secure IP, that are not directly connected to the Defense Switch Network,” Gueldenpfennig said. “We have an advanced VoSIP gateway application where you can make a call from one to another. It allows a user on a SCIP device in a legacy TDM network such as the DSN to dial a black number and speak securely to a classified VoSIP user.”

The JUICE exercise demonstrated those capabilities, enabling users to conduct end-to-end interoperable command and control communications across a variety of networks and standards.

But VoIP brings with it challenges of security and reliability. DISA requires vendors on its approved products list to implement new requirements periodically and to retest those products at the JITC to ensure that they can withstand a host of threats.

“When you think of your PC being connected to the network, you have the risk of viruses or being brought down by a denial-of-service attack. The same thing applies to a VoIP switch,” Gueldenpfennig explained.

JITC thus tests the information assurance of products periodically to see that they meet security and reliability requirements for warfighters.

“One of the problems is that these kinds of threats crop up at a really fast pace,” Gueldenpfennig said. “Every time there is a new threat, the requirements change to make sure that threat is mitigated. Whenever you go to JITC for testing, you have to meet those latest requirements. It takes a considerable amount of time to get that accomplished. One of the challenges of this process is getting the product to the customer in a timely fashion.” In agreement with the need to get through the JITC in a timely fashion is Ed Bursk, who heads government business development for Nokia Siemens Networks.

“Nokia Siemens Networks has a long history of supporting U.S. government telecommunications and networking, in over 100 sites, worldwide,” Bursk said. “Bringing key solutions through the JITC is essential—to us as a partner to government to prove out government-specific capabilities, as well as to the government to assure the security of our solutions. For an example, we’re now bringing our next generation voice/video/data solution for DISA, Air Force, Army and more—including a multi-function softswitch and a local session controller per DISA’s Unified Capabilities Requirements spec—into the JITC, to show both LSC and MFSS with Assured Services SIP, for VoIP, video and data end-to-end across the network.”

The Nokia Siemens Networks solution overlays existing TDM-based sites with Nortel, Siemens and other switches seamlessly and enables reliable wide-area communications for voice, video, conferencing and collaboration apps. The company is working closely with DISA on its next generation of networking services, Bursk noted.

DEFENSE SWITCHED NETWORK

The capabilities for using VoIP come from the switches installed on the Defense Switched Network (DSN) as well as the DRSN. For as long as those networks have been in existence, DoD has relied heavily on contractors such as Nortel.

DISA hired Nortel to deploy a six-Multi-Function Switch backbone for the DSN in preparation for the eventual transition to VoIP. Of the 22 sites selected for upgrade to Multi-Function Soft Switch capability, Nortel is currently providing voice service to 21 of them (with Nokia Siemens Networks providing the other), said Steven Derr, vice president of engineering for Nortel Government Solutions products.

The first phase of the VoIP work occurred from 2004 to 2008, Derr noted, where stakeholders developed the unified capability requirements for DoD, resulting in the publication of the requirements in December 2008. DISA, Nortel, Siemens and others like Cisco participated in the four-year study to develop the unified capability standards, Derr remarked.

From there, the project has entered the second phase, where deployment of the multi-function soft switch backbone occurs. Companies like Nortel are in the process of responding to requests for proposal to carry out that work. Derr anticipates contract awards in the third quarter of 2009 and implementation to occur through the final quarter of 2009 through mid-2011 to the 22 sites. A small number of sites would be upgraded initially, with multi-vendor participation anticipated, according to Bursk.

The third phase of the project runs through 2015, whereupon all VoIP infrastructure should be installed and operational for the Army and Air Force.

Defining the requirements for the project and preparing for its execution have posed unique issues, Derr noted. “The first challenge was being able to replicate the military-unique functionality that exists today in TDM. There was no way to do it in Voice over IP.”

So DoD, Nortel, Nokia Siemens and others worked together to develop a standard signaling protocol based on SIP for assured services. Traditional assured services provide multi-level precedence and priority where users can preempt and override phone calls in a TDM environment based on privilege class, Derr said. Assured services SIP does the same thing for military users.

With that breakthrough, warfighters are poised to take advantage of things VoIP can do easily that old TDM networks could do only with difficulty.

For example, “Somebody could be out there on a very low-bandwidth satellite link and they are trying to report information back,” Derr offered. “Think of special operations forces on the edge. All they have is a low-bandwidth tactical link that they can set up once in a while. They send some information and have a quick conversation and then they have to move and ‘get out of Dodge’ and do something else so they don’t get caught. That’s the ultimate edge of the tactical network.

“Those guys want to have a single unified client where they can communicate in whatever means that their bandwidth and network connectivity will allow,” Derr stated.

The Nortel Application Server 5300 provides warfighters with a single client that can handle instant messaging, video, VoIP and other needs, thereby eliminating the need for multiple pieces of equipment to fulfill a single task of communicating forward information or providing situational awareness, Derr commented.

The Nokia Siemens Networks Mil NGN solution provides integrated voice, messaging, video and data transfer capabilities from the desk to the field and back, with assured services end to end. In places where bandwidth isn’t an issue, for example at a major base, users can take advantage of readily available features such as instant messaging and Web collaboration within a robust environment, Derr added.

While all of these operations have gone very well to date, Derr acknowledged that there have been some challenges about security in the future as IPv6 takes root in defense networks. A number of things must occur for a secure transition to IPv6, but no agencies are receiving dedicated funding to budget for the transition.

“Nobody has an IPv6 transition budget to execute against, yet we keep having to develop and implement against the IPv6 RFCs that are out there in order to meet the JITC requirements,” Derr said.

DOD CALLING

A VoIP call requires a device to make that call, and developers such as General Dynamics have been stepping up to the plate to provide such phones. The Sectéra vIPer Universal Secure Phone is one of the top performers in VoIP communication devices.

“One of its distinguishing factors is that in addition to Voice over IP, it acts as a universal phone. As organizations migrate to Voice over IP, they also have the capability to operate on the conventional PSTN network with a single phone. The user can convert the device over to Voice over IP when their organization converts to Voice over IP,” said Tom Liggett, business area manager for voice products at the Information Assurance Division of General Dynamics.

The vIPer phone has the latest National Security Agency Type-1 cryptography in it, which makes it a superior option to legacy devices like the STU-3 phone, Liggett said.

Indeed, as NSA continues to push forward with enhanced cryptography standards, Liggett noted, vIPer can implement upgrades to those standards easily as it makes use of software-based cryptography.

vIPer also ensures interoperability with other communications devices on various networks, Liggett said. The phone interoperates with secure terminal equipment (STE) products, general cellular networks, and the Sectéra Edge secure smartphone, among other devices. And it does so with the highest security standards.

“The vIPer phone provides end-to-end secure communications, which is a unique capability,” Liggett noted. “The voice conversation is completely encrypted from one end-device to another device. There are certain enclaves within the Defense Red Switch Network right now where that’s not the case. You might have an enclave of cleared telephones, and you might encrypt a link between your building and another building, but there is still a portion of that path where the voice communication is not encrypted. With the vIPer, you get complete encryption from end to end, so it allows another layer of security.”

General Dynamics also focused a lot on voice quality in the development of its vIPer phone, Liggett said. That’s particularly important to tactical warfighters in low-bandwidth environments.

“These devices go into a lot of environments where they might be ultimately operating over a SATCOM link or low-bandwidth links. There are a lot of aspects of the design that we went through to ensure good voice quality over these tactical networks,” he commented.

The vIPer phone is also SIP-capable, making it ready for use over the VoIP switches to be deployed on the DSN, Liggett observed. General Dynamics is participating in the interoperability testing to ensure reliable communications over the new switches.

Once the VoIP switches have been rolled out, all military agencies can take advantage of cost savings associated with VoIP, Liggett said. “Currently, networks are somewhat mixed. With analog phones in an organization, a different organization is typically maintaining your phone system than your computer network. One of the big advantages with Voice over IP for both clear communications and secure communications is that you can now have a single IT organization that administers your entire network,” Liggett stated.

“As you add the security overlay into that, you can expand that network into secure areas and take advantage of the cost savings of Voice over IP,” he concluded. ✯

Back to Top