Category: Military

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R16.4 Preview Release

We’re pleased to announce that a preview release, R16.4, is now available.

This preview release will be mostly of interest to military users. It will enable the evaluation of a number of new ACP127 and BRASS capabilities.

The following BRASS features are in R16.4.

  • ACP127 Broadcast. Including operation over serial and non-ARQ COSS, ship and shore sides, and NATO and Italian RECAP messages, automatic retransmission requests/retransmission, and two minute messages.
  • Ship to Shore. Configuration of separate ship to shore circuits is added.
  • Off The Air Monitoring (OTAM). The OTAM process can compare the transmit and receive data streams. If they vary by more than a configurable amount (i.e., corresponding to a bit error rate on the received stream) then the OTAM process will flag this to a management process.
  • Serial Line support. Support for serial hubs such as Digi Portserver TS. The ACP127 data can be sent direct to modem allowing broadcast with or without the use of a 5066 server.
  • Support for Recap messages and retransmission allowing lost messages to be sent successfully.

The new ACP127 management features are:

  • Mconsole has a new Circuit Monitoring View, that enables useful monitoring of ACP127 traffic. This also provides the ability to take over the stream manually.
  • Mconsole has a new ACP127 Message Transfer View allowing the operator to view ACP127 messages currently queued for transfer out
  • Mconsole has a new OTAM monitoring GUI.

Support for the following ACP127 Variants has been added.

  • ACP128 support.
  • ACP126 support.
  • DOI-103 support.
  • DOI-103s support.
  • ACP 126 support.
  • Janap 128 support.
  • BSG support.

R16.4 is currently available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, 7 (64 bit) including CentOS equivalents, Windows Server 2008 R2 (64 bit), Windows 2012 and Windows 2012 R2. Debian Linux 8 64-bit will be added in a subsequent update to R16.4.

R16.4 will be supported until the release of our next major release (R17.0) and is for test and demonstration systems only, we will not support running R16.4 in a production environment.

If you wish to obtain a copy of the R16.4 preview release contact us at customer-service@isode.com.

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Draft & Release for Military Messaging: An Open, Online Approach

In military communications, messages are frequently sent to organizations (e.g., a Command) rather than to an individual or to a role.

The receiving organization will process the message using a Profiler, which looks at meta-information (such as a Subject Indicator Code “SIC”) in the message in order to dispatch it to the appropriate recipient. This process of examination and dispatch is known as draft and release and is, today, mostly done using a mix of paper and online systems. A number of deployments have sought to introduce entirely online systems for draft and release but the approaches used in those deployments all have weaknesses.

In a new whitepaper on the Isode website, “Open Online Draft & Release“, Isode proposes a new open standards based approach to online draft and release, combining the best practices of existing systems with capabilities for message review which can be used independent of draft and release.

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New Whitepaper: Isode’s Solution for BRASS

HF Radio is an important naval communication channel for ‘beyond line of sight’ (BLOS) communication, BRASS (Broadcast and Ship to Shore) is an approach used by Navies, particularly those of NATO countries, to communicate between ships and shore using HF.

In a new whitepaper (Isode’s Solution for BRASS) we give an overview of BRASS and describe our strategy and solution for this area. The whitepaper looks at how our products can support the protocols and interoperability for currently deployed BRASS systems and move them forward to state of the art capabilities that can extend the services offered over BRASS.

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M-Switch ACP127 Gateway to STANAG 4406 and MMHS over SMTP

ACP127 is an older military messaging protocol, which remains in widespread use along with a number of similar protocols such as DOI 103 and ACP 128. Isode’s M-Switch already provides full server side support for STANAG 4406, ACP 145 and MMHS over SMTP. We’ve now added support for ACP127 and selected related protocols to the M-Switch product enabling gateway connections between SMTP and STANAG 4406 services and ACP127 systems.

Product information is available on the M-Switch ACP127 product page.

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Isode at the HFIA #2: MoRaSky

The High Frequency Industry Association (HFIA) provides an “industry driven forum for the interactive exchange of technical and information in the area of High Frequency Communications.” Phyiscal meetings of the group usually take place twice a year and in September 2014 Portsmouth was the location for the latest of these meetings. This is the second of two blog posts covering our attendance at this meeting, the first can be found here.

As an application developer, Isode is interested in how the whole modem/radio/sky system affects the data stream and, by extension, the performance of our applications.

In our final HFIA presentation, Isode’s Jim Peters gave an analysis of variations in the signal to noise ratio (SNR) based on over the air trials performed by our partner, Rockwell Rollins, between Cedar Rapids and Las Cruces. Jim is leading Isode’s “MoRaSky” project to develop a test tool that allows us to model the modem/radio/sky combination. This tool will help us test applications in the lab, prior to live OTA trials.

OTA Measurements

A PDF of the full text of Jim’s talk Analysis of Intermediate Term variation from OTA Measurements can be found by following the link. MoRaSky is available to all of our partners and integrators. If you’re interested in using MoRaSky, please contact us.

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Isode at the HFIA #1: Proposed Extensions to STANAG 5066

The High Frequency Industry Association (HFIA) provides an “industry driven forum for the interactive exchange of technical and information in the area of High Frequency Communications.” Physical meetings of the group usually take place twice a year and in September 2014 Portsmouth was the location for the latest of these meetings. This is the first of two blog posts covering our attendance at this meeting.

As Isode has an interest in applications for constrained bandwidth communications, we often attend and occasionally present at these meetings. This year we had two presentations to share with the attendees.

Steve Kille at the HFIA
Steve Kille at the HFIA

Isode CEO, Steve Kille, gave a talk focusing on Isode’s proposed extensions to STANAG 5066 to improve performance of applications running over wideband HF links. The first was an update to a talk Isode gave at the February HFIA meeting, this time including hard measurements showing that Isode’s extensions (known as LFSN, Long Frame Sequence Number) result in significant performance gains.

This was followed by a live demonstration of the extensions in action, enabling co-existence of bulk and time critical applications over narrow-band and wide-band HF. The applications used were Multi-User Chat and Real-Time Military Forms (both using the XMPP protocol) and military email messaging.

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New Event: Isode at the High Frequency Industry Association

Isode will be presenting at the High Frequency Industry Association (HFIA) meeting at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK on 11th September 2014. We’ll be presenting two separate sessions:

  1. An update to and measurement of the proposed STANAG 5066 extensions to improve ARQ performance, and
  2. A demonstration of bulk and time critical applications co-existing over HF and WBHF and using those extensions.

We’ll be using a number of Isode applications for messaging including email, chat and forms data submission on a range of mobile devices during the demo.

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Creating & Managing a Security Label Policy (new whitepaper)

Security Labels are a key component of systems providing security, particularly for military and government use where they are used to provide protective marking on information and as the basis for access control. Security Label Policy (generally simply termed “security policy” in most security label standards) controls the detailed structure of security labels and how they are used to provide access control.

A new whitepaper on the Isode website explains our open standards approach to supporting security policies in extremely complex environments. It also shows how our tools can be used to support simple environments using open standards, avoiding the need for a proprietary approach.

The whitepaper introduces some of the key concepts in this area and then describes the capabilities of Isode’s Security Policy Information File (SPIF) Editor in a way that enables a quick evaluation of the product.

Whitepaper Update

We’ve also made significant updates to an earlier whitepaper Using OSCP, LDAP & HTTP for Certificate Checking in a Large Scale Distributed Environment and over Constrained Networks adding a new section, Management Tools, that illustrates our product capabilities in this area.

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New “Military forms using XMPP” whitepaper and access to our Military forms Demo

Forms are important for military operations, and there is often a need to handle forms quickly and share with a large number of users, such as Medical Evacuation (MEDEVAC) alerts.

XMPP based open standard instant messaging is widely used by military organisations and is a sensible framework for sharing forms. Our new whitepaper [Military Forms using XMPP], published on the Isode website today, looks at the requirements for military forms and how the XEP-0346 “Forms Display and Publishing” (FDP) can be used to provide real time military forms. It looks at how capabilities provided by M-Link support military forms using FDP, and how gateways can enable integration with other services. FDP is supported in the most recent R16.2 release along with FDP Management in M-Link Console.