N.E.T. Federal and the Other UC

Recently, N.E.T. Federal (the Network Equipment Technologies subsidiary focused on government communications) sponsored and presented a webinar as part of the SIGNAL Webinar Series entitled, “Enabling Software Powered Unified Capabilities Over the IP Cloud.” This webinar and the associated whitepaper highlight the deep technical capabilities required of NET to support the Federal Government’s need for secure real-time communications over its network. Both the Federal and commercial networks are transitioning to UC, and NET is deeply involved in facilitating both transformations - Unified Communications in the commercial markets, as exemplified by its close support for Microsoft’s OCS, and Unified Capabilities, (defined below), in Federal, as exemplified by its gateways’ support of the government’s extension of SIP called AS-SIP (Assured Services Session Initiation Protocol) and MLPP (Multi Level Precedence and Preemption).

As highlighted in the webinar and whitepaper, AS-SIP extends the already broad SIP standards to include several capabilities important to support secure and reliable real-time communications as the networks are evolving towards IP while the legacy TDM is still in operation. And NET’s gateways, enabled with AS-SIP, perform a significant role in facilitating these communications. Gateways provide the critical functions that enable the transport of secure communications originating and terminating on new (IP-based) or legacy (TDM-based) instruments (specialized fixed and mobile phones), which may be connected via phone systems (IP-PBXes or legacy TDM-PBXes). These communications also face network challenges often transmitting over satellites (introducing delay and errors) with bandwidth constraints while calls are competing with other communications for priority and precedence. Gateways enabled with AS-SIP make these communications work smoothly, securely and reliably. AS-SIP capable gateways must support at least four key capabilities in these mission critical networks:

• Supports precedence and pre-emption for communications (termed MLPP for multi-level precedence and pre-emption): adds a scheme for setting priorities so that higher priority calls always get through and can pre-empt lower priority calls, when necessary.
• Ensuring reliable connections, even across satellites where delays, jitter and brief losses of connectivity are common: The AS-SIP gateway protects these calls via a technique called secure call relay – keeping calls “alive” and managing jitter.
• Efficient bandwidth management by managing packet packing and framing modulation: decreases bandwidth utilization allowing for more calls on bandwidth constrained links.
• Support of legacy and new secure devices: permitting the migration and interconnection of existing  Secure Communications Interoperability Protocol (SCIP) devices  to IP devices implementing the V.150.1 Universal Modem Relay standard.

Federal networks, especially DoD networks, are based upon the same technologies as normal commercial networks. However, because of their extra requirements to support warfighters’ needs across networks that often have small capacity and are carrying multiple-types of traffic, all of which must be secure and reliable, special extensions to enterprise communications technologies, to provide military unique features, have been developed for many years, including secure instruments with encryption and pre-empting higher priority calls with notification. NET has been able to leverage its skills, techniques, and capabilities honed in the Federal marketplace to its commercial offerings, and vice-versa – a neat synergy benefitting both market segments. And NET continues to deliver its unique ability to facilitate communications as networks, devices and modalities migrate from legacies to futures. N.E.T. Federal has existed and supported the specific communications needs of the Federal government since the 1980s – developing deep expertise in delivering secure and reliable communications for the critical communications of the Department of Defense (DoD).

Both commercial and Federal voice communications and networks are transforming into their respective versions of UC. NET’s experiences in supporting both user communities position it to meet the critical gateway requirements of both. However, while critical, gateways do not provide the complete solutions and NET must continue to partner appropriately to assist in delivering complete solutions.

Definition

“Unified Capabilities are the integration of voice, video, and data services delivered ubiquitously across a secure and highly available network infrastructure, independent of technology, to provide increased mission effectiveness to the warfighter and business communities. Unified Capabilities integrates standards-based communication and collaboration services including, but not limited to: messaging; voice, video, and web conferencing; and unified communication and collaboration applications or clients. These standards-based UC services are integrated with available enterprise applications, both business and warfighting.” (From: Department of Defense Unified Capabilities Requirements 2008, Change 1- January 2010)  

This paper is sponsored by NET.