SAIII Wireless Infrastructure Outline and General
Comms Experiment/Demonstration Schedule
(V 1.0 dated 14 August 2006)
The purpose of this summary is to provide a layman’s description of the events that will take place during the Monday-Friday timeframe for Strong Angel III. Various Information, Communications, and Technology (ICT) components of the Strong Angel III event will take place during this timeframe in San Diego California. In addition it describes the purpose of the activities, who will provide various services / demonstrations, what technologies will be showcased, and how it all ties together to address the art of the possible for communications in austere environments for future US or international disasters, whether natural or manmade. Most of the solutions that are brought to bear are in response to a number of communications lessons learned from recent large scale disasters including our own Hurricane Katrina, the SE Asian tsunami of December 2004, the recent earthquakes and mudslides in Indonesia and the Philippines, the Pakistan/Afghanistan earthquakes, etc.
NOTE: This complete document will not be published on the Public Internet SAIII site or any other completely public venue. It is being distributed only to SAIII Vendor teams and to other trusted entities for OPSEC reasons. An edited/shortened version of the document will be posted on the Public Internet SAIII site's WiKi - but only the sections above the actual experiment/demo timeline will be published publicly (aka the timeline will not be publicly disseminated).
SAIII Communications Director Leadership Team:
· Professor Brian Steckler, Naval Post Graduate School (Communications Director)
· Mr. Brooks King. US Corporate Networks (Communications Advisor)
· Mr. Doug Hanchard, Bell Canada (Communications Advisor and RF Coordinator)
Infrastructure Vendors and Wireless Cloud Teams:
· Cisco/IBM/Future Technologies (WiFi/WiMAX/VSAT Cloud Provider Team)
· Bell Canada (WiFi/WiMAX/VSAT Cloud Provider)
· DRASTIC (NGO) (Mobile WiFi/VSAT Solution Provider)
· Naval Post Graduate School (Mobile WiFi/WiMAX/VSAT Solution Provider)
· Blue Force Development/OSI (Mobile WiFi/WiMAX/VSAT Solution Provider Team)
· Qualcomm (Rapid Deploy Cellular Communications Systems)
· Sprint/Nextel (Rapid Deploy Cellular Communications Systems)
· San Diego State University
· USMC Marine Corps West Installation Group - Camp Pendleton Comms Team
· MEDWEB/Loma Linda University (Medical Apps and Mobile WiFi/WiMAX/VSAT Solution Provider Team -Assigned to Shadowlite)
· General Electric Energy Division (Generator Deployment)
· Microsoft SPOT (FM Radio) Team
· Local, Remote and International HAM Radio Teams
Scenario, Technologies to be Deployed:
The overarching theme for SAIII’s communications activities is an assumption that due to an H5N1 Avian Flu pandemic that is sweeping the nation and the world all of the local San Diego telecommunications and power utility service providers personnel are either dead, sick, or worrying about their families…..and are therefore not on the job at work maintaining critical regional power and telecommunications services. In a short time both the power grid and the telecommunications infrastructure begin to fail. Since this is happening in multiple cities around the country, as in Katrina, the Federal Government has their hands full and the local San Diego community realizes it is up to them to respond (with help from others represented by the SAIII group in this case) to the disaster as best they can without expectation for the US Government to come to their aid any time soon. We call this “local heavy lifting”. The local community cries out for the private sector, NGOs and other capable organizations both locally and nationally to come to their aid.
The result is the appearance of a large number of vendor teams that agree to provide a wide-ranging variety of rapidly deployed communications technologies that includes WiFi clouds (802.11), WiMAX point-to-point longhaul wireless (802.16), satellite Internet connectivity (VSAT, BGAN, etc), push-to-talk radio integration systems, rapidly deployed cellular communications capabilities, and more. All of these technologies, most primarily based on TCP/IP and satellite communications (for Internet reachback), end up being the only source of voice and data communications in the region -- since the local normal Internet infrastructure goes down along with the local telecommunications infrastructure.
Specifically for SAIII there are 3 key teams of vendors (Cisco/IBM/FT, Bell Canada and Blue Force Development/OSI) that provide 2.5 mile WiFi (802.11 b/g) wireless clouds - one at an Emergency Operations Center we set up (EOC or Core Site) that the SAIII leadership establishes on the first day of the event near the San Diego Int’l Airport (old Navy Training Center, now converted into a SD Fire Dept training facility), another at San Diego State University (the SAIII event host - particularly the SDSU Visualization Lab), and another along the water near Mission Beach. All three of these wireless clouds are Internet enabled via one or more VSAT broadband satellite terminals the vendors provide. All three of these wireless clouds are then tied together in a hub-and-spoke topology using either WiMAX (802.16) or WiFi (802.11a).
Hearkening back to key lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina, we realize that a mere three areas would likely not be the only areas in an urban setting that require communications of all kinds (Internet voice/data, push-to-talk radio, cellular, etc). As a disaster response process unfolds, new sites pop up on an ongoing basis - whether Red Cross shelters, emergency worker bases of operations, or simply areas that survive a disaster or are relatively safe where the general public and local victims tend to congregate. So, a number of the vendors participating in SAIII have completely mobile solutions (currently DRASTIC, BFD/OSI, NPS, Loma Linda University and the USMC Camp Pendleton Comms Group) that can be moved in a matter of minutes from one location to another and establish Internet connectivity (via satellite services such as VSAT or BGAN via Inmarsat). We will deploy a large number of these mobile units at pre-determined remote locations to create “mini-clouds”, and will deploy more of these mobile units in real time to as yet undisclosed remote locations to also create “mini-clouds”. Several of these mobile platforms will be capable of independent Internet access via VSAT/BGAN but others will be capable of that as well as having the capability of tying into the other core sites via WiMAX or similar technologies.
Internet access and the long standing and common collaboration and communications technologies that it provides (such as Voice Over IP, email, web, video conferencing, etc) is not all that is needed. The normal UHF and other radio systems that emergency responders in a city rely on to provide command and control are out of commission due to the widespread power outages and the lack of maintenance personnel due to the pandemic. Some of the SAIII vendors will bring a relatively new capability to the event called Land Mobile Radio over IP - which is a hardware/software system that allows UHF, 900 MHz, cellular, and other voice communications systems to interoperate (aka different systems can talk to each other). There will also be SAIII coordinated multiple HAM activities throughout the week both locally and internationally. In addition, the scenario dictates that the local normal cellular network infrastructure is either overwhelmed or in some cases cell sites are down due to power outages and lack of maintenance personnel. Again, this was the case all throughout the Gulf Coast after Katrina. For this problem, vendors (Qualcomm and Sprint/Nextel) will be demonstrating rapidly deployed independent cellular phone systems - that can tie into surviving cellular systems or act as a regional alternate means of voice communications standalone. These companies will also be demonstrating other technologies that are made possible by implementing a “rapid deploy” temporary cellular infrastructure such as Cellular on Wheels (COW) or Cellular on Light Trucks (COLT).
Other less common (but highly valuable in austere disaster relief environments that SAIII represents) means of telecommunications based technologies will also be demonstrated during the heart of the SAIII week of activities including Microsoft SPOT FM radio communications distribution system, various GPS enabled tracking systems, etc.
SAIII an Ad Hoc Event versus Military or US Government Sponsored/Organized Event:
This event is purposely organized, managed, and sponsored by an ad hoc group from industry, academia, government, NGOs and other entities versus a US government owned/sponsored event. One of our primary goals is to show the art of the possible without the constraints of formal military exercises and without the constraints of following US disaster doctrine (whether it be the National Response Plan or City/State Emergency Operations Plans or other). We would like to enjoy the freedom of doing things differently than the norm. One of the significant outcomes of the event will be an “Experimental Emergency Operation Plan” or X-EOP that will be “process” oriented versus the normal EOP that is essentially “procedure” driven. This X-EOP will also serve as the overarching document to run the event day to day. That document will be completed sometime in the next couple of weeks.
Specific Pre-Published SAIII Objectives these Activities will Address:
The activities listed in this report are designed to directly address 11 of the 49 pre-published SAIII objectives. The entire list of SAIII objectives can be found at . Specific Objectives this set of wireless communications activities address are Task/Objective numbers 3, 6, 10, 19, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 35, and 39. Some direct and obvious tasks/objectives and the related activities listed in this document map to some of these Task/Objectives. Some are a bit less directly related, or are related to multiple activities, some not necessarily tied to the communications wireless infrastructure deployment plan/schedule that this document outlines.
Task # Description
2. Deployment kits customized for task member responsibility
3. Resurrection - rapidly deploy lighting, power and communications
6. Hook up City’s key infrastructure with urgent power and communications
10. Broad area WiFi cloud deployment
19. Sustainable and independent power
21. Sustainable and efficient lighting
23. Civil-Military radio management by protocol
24. Voice Over IP (VoIP) management
26. HAM radio integration and management
27. Video/VoIP for interviews and secure reporting
35. Simple Sharing feeds for information flow
39. Situational awareness and visualization
