Realizing Secure Cellular and Mobile Hot-Spot Extension to Tactical Networks

The advances of Commercial cellular networks and smart devices over the last decade have changed the way end users are communicating and connecting to each other. The soldiers in the battlefield are no exception and they would also like to have the similar experience as civilians have. Cellular networks are also providing significantly higher bandwidth at a much lower cost relative to tactical networks. However, these networks are not yet ready to be used as-is in military environment. Issues such as, frequency flexibility, operations in hostile environment, security, range extension, multicast, Push-to-Talk (PTT), and seamless session mobility that need to be addressed. Several efforts have started to look into the feasibility and deployability issues of commercial networks and devices so that they can be used as an extension to tactical networks. In recent years our focus have been addressing such issues and working closely with the US Army to fulfill the tactical requirements while hardening the technology. In this paper, we present a secure network architecture to the tactical edge that can leverage commercial cellular and ad hoc Wi-Fi networks as range extension and Android platform based smart devices fulfilling the tactical networking and security requirements. We describe our software design, implementation and recent demonstration at a Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) - 4 and 5 in US Army Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, and Fort Dix, NJ, USA.