Two-way radios have been a staple of military communications for decades. Although the technology has evolved over the years, in some ways, it is not as advanced as the everyday cell phone. Military personnel have come to rely on mobile phones’ range and ease of use for overall communications. But in disaster situations in the United States and overseas, cellular service is often not available.
Therefore, the Army Reserve Command at Fort McPherson, Ga., awarded contracts to two companies to develop an integrated solution that would allow the military to launch cellular service quickly in any area.
LGS Innovations LLC, a subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent, and Pacific Star Communications, a communications systems technology company, collaborated to create a rapid response solution.
The effort resulted in the Tactical Base Station Router, a system about half the size of a laptop PC that quickly establishes an area of cell phone coverage. It allows local communications between mobile phones and connections to landline phones and mobile phones anywhere on the traditional communications grid.
“We had a long-term relationship with the Army Reserve, as did PacStar, and we both approached the Reserve separately about providing this capability,” said Chris Stark, LGS’ business development director for the Tactical Base Station Router. “They asked our two companies to get together and get our technologies to work together, and we did it.”
RIPPLES FROM KATRINA
The project started just after Hurricane
Katrina, when military commanders assisting
with rescue efforts realized they needed
cell phone service in addition to standard
communications and networks. They
wanted a transportable, deployable cellular
solution that could be available in any area
at home or abroad.
LGS contributed its single-box Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) cellular solution, which encapsulates all cellular network functions in a box that weighs about 5 pounds.
“We like to call it cellular over IP,” Stark said.
The base station boasts the functions of a cell tower and all the switching fabric behind it on a single card inside the box. It handles all the cellular communications. It supports standard GSM cell phone operations so the Army Reserve Command can buy phones for daily use, and when disaster hits, the router will keep those phones operational.
The product also integrates cellular switching and logic with voice-over-IP technology, enabling troops to talk to people beyond the range of the base station through standard phone connections. The base station can run either as a standalone box or as part of a larger VOIP enterprisewide system.
LGS’ technology is integrated with PacStar’s 5500 network, which supports as many as 92 users connecting with phones, laptop PCs and IP-based devices. “We provided the public switched network connection” for the router, said Robert Frisbee, PacStar’s chief executive officer. The company’s private branch exchange works like a PBX in an office setting by connecting phones to the outside world.
“The LGS technology creates this pond of cellular coverage where GSM phones can speak to other GSM phones, but it had no connectivity with the outside world,” Frisbee said. “So the 5500 links it to the outside world both for people on-site and it has the interfaces required to hook it up to the public switched telephone network.”
There are two models: The small box has a one- to two-mile range while the larger model is a 20-watt amplified macro cell that operates at the same power level cell towers typically use in rural areas. That box has a range of as much as 17 miles. However, typical operating parameters range from five to 10 miles. The boxes have standard connectors for antennas, which must be deployed at a reasonable height, such as on a building or tower.
“The strength of the technology is that instead of bringing what typically would require a 20-foot truck with switching gear in it, what we’ve done is compress that down to a single card in terms of all the switching fabric,” Stark said.
The system also offers a building-block approach. In a typical urban network, many low-power cells are deployed in a centralized switching architecture, which the Tactical Base Station Router can also do. For example, the military could construct a network using multiple routers that are connected on a standard IP backhaul and distributed across a disaster area to provide multiple coverage areas.
“There’s no centralized switch, so if [routers] lose a network, they will still operate on their own,” Stark said. “But if they’re interconnected, they’ll handle all the handover of calls as you walk through the network, and they’ll do load balancing if they’re co-located. So it’s a true cellularlike experience but enabled through IP on the backhaul.”
Staff writer Doug Beizer can be reached at dbeizer@1105govinfo.com.
