On the adaptation of commercial smartphones to tactical environments

Commercial smartphones are being actively looked at as solving the communication needs of the future warfighter. Several ongoing efforts are driving the research and development of custom hardware, architectures, middleware and software to bring smartphones into the tactical realm. In this work², we first present a deployment architecture and use cases for commercial smartphones to be used in a heterogeneous environment that includes expeditionary cellular, ad-hoc wireless and indigenous cellular networks as well as smartphone connecting to traditional military radios over other native interfaces. We then introduce the Heterogeneous Tactical Gateway (HTG), an appliqué based platform that attaches to the expeditionary cellular system in a tactical vehicle and offers a fully configurable set of capabilities such as, tunneling, multicast, NAT(Network Address Translation), mobility and security management. The HTG is an IP-based solution completely independent of underlying radio access technology (e.g., EV-DO, HSPA, LTE and WiMAX) and vendor specific hardware box. HTG functional components can be incorporated when standards interfaces emerge that attempt to collate tactical and commercial requirements for communications and security. We also discuss some experiments and results that have been performed in the S&TCD lab at CERDEC, Ft Monmouth, NJ.