Wavelink Case Studies

City of Aurora Police and Fire Deploy Wavelink Avalanche and Mobile Manager to Update Mobile Laptops on the Fly

Vital Data and Software Upgrades Download Quickly Over WiFi Network While Patrol Cars Refuel

Immediately adjacent to Denver, the City of Aurora with nearly 300,000 residents is the second most populous city in the metro area and the third largest city in the state of Colorado. The Aurora Police Department is nationally recognized for its innovative and progressive approach to public safety.

Aurora´s 300-vehicle fleet of police cars and fire trucks have been equipped with wireless laptop computers for several years now, providing critical information to police officers and firefighters on the streets in Aurora´s 144 square mile city limits.

The laptops mounted in each vehicle deliver comprehensive maps of every part of the city with detailed information about all the major buildings, including the location of fire hydrants and electrical junction boxes, hazardous materials, and much more. Combined with new GIS (Geographic Information System) technology, the laptops can plot and display the location of all public safety vehicles responding to an incident.

In addition, the laptops provide wireless real-time access to central dispatch and reporting systems, as well as remote access to local, state, and federal records and crime-fighting databases. Police can check vehicle licenses and photos of suspects online directly from their police car.

A Download Time Crunch

These wireless mobile laptops are unquestionably powerful tools, but they can be virtually useless in an emergency if they are not kept up to date.

Mike Bedwell, Manager of Public Safety Systems for the City of Aurora, gives an example: "We were infected by the Blaster worm [a computer virus] recently. On a Friday night from 5:00 at night until 2:00 in the morning, I had fourteen people going out and touching every one of our police cars in the street. We had to physically bring the cars in and spend about fifteen minutes on each vehicle upgrading the software with security patches."

"If we could have done that remotely over the air, as we can now," says Bedwell, "one person could have sent the security patch out from our central office, and the job would have been done in much less time with much less manpower."

Aurora has since deployed WiFi hotspots at each of four fuel depots around the city, and equipped each mobile laptop with Wavelink Avalanche software to enable rapid software downloads directly from the city´s network operating center in the Municipal Justice building.

The Need for More Bandwidth

While the public-carrier cellular phone network in Aurora provides adequate bandwidth for the basic data communications of the city´s public safety software, it cannot efficiently accommodate the larger file downloads required to update those software applications (Versaterm, Printrak), the operating system software (Windows 2000), or the data-intensive mapping software (ESRI) deployed on the police and fire laptops.

Like many public safety organizations in the US, Aurora´s police and fire departments are making the transition from an older CDPD (Cellular Digital Packet Data, 19.2 Kilobit-per-second) cellular network to a somewhat faster GPRS (General Packet Radio services, 56 -114 Kilobit-per-second) cellular network to speed basic data communications with officers and firefighters in the field. But even the incremental increase in bandwidth provided by GPRS cannot match the eleven Megabit-per-second data speed of WiFi (802.11b).

"Before, if we had a software version release, we would have to pull in the 200 to 300 laptops, re-image them and then redeploy them back out to the cars again," explains Deanne Robertson, System Coordinator for Public Safety Systems in Aurora. "When we had to re-image 200 police cars, it took four to five people at least two weeks. Now, with Avalanche and NetMotion Mobility over the WiFi hotspots, we can send down a twenty Megabyte software package in fifty seconds."

Robertson sees a huge benefit in being able to update the police and fire laptops over the air from a central location. "There are a lot of resources we put out on those laptops and we have to update them frequently," she says. "Software upgrades for computer aided dispatch and records management come along twice a year. Security patches and new virus definitions come out almost daily."

In addition to Wavelink Avalanche and Mobile Manager software for managing the WiFi portion of the city´s growing network, Aurora has deployed new mobility management software from NetMotion Wireless, a Wavelink partner, to provide VPN (Virtual Private Network) security for all wireless data transmissions and manage a seamless handoff between the various wireless network infrastructures now in operation - CDPD, GPRS, and WiFi.

How It Works

Bedwell describes how it works. "When a vehicle drives into the refueling location, even though that laptop is already connected through CDPD or GPRS, WiFi becomes the fastest available connection, and NetMotion Mobility automatically switches to that connection for us. Then seamlessly, without any intervention from the operator of the equipment, Avalanche starts downloading the software upgrades to the laptop in the vehicle."

"If the vehicle must leave the fuel pumps prior to the complete download, there´s a bookmark placed in the file," Bedwell explains, "the next time that vehicle returns to our WiFi network, Avalanche recognizes the bookmark and resumes the download at that exact same point."

A Cutting Edge Solution

The City of Aurora worked directly with Anyware Network Solutions, a wireless systems integrator and Wavelink partner headquartered in Denver, to realize Bedwell´s vision and meet the city´s public safety requirements.

"Trust me, to get all that to work together was not easy, but it´s cool," says Bedwell. "We´re one of the first implementations in the country. Our role was Beta testing. We´ve worked with all these different vendors. The advantage is that the bells and whistles were developed just for us."

While NetMotion Wireless provides secure encryption and ensures session persistence across the different wireless mediums, the book-marking feature in Wavelink Avalanche ensures that downloads are handled with maximum efficiency and reliability.

"With NetMotion Mobility, the officers don´t have to re-authenticate to the server every time they get out of range and drop their signal," explains Todd Leven, Wireless Network Consultant with Anyware Network Solutions. "And Wavelink was very quick to respond to our customer´s needs. When we first started testing the system to download maps over the secure network, the process took a long time. Mapping is very bandwidth intensive. Wavelink wrote the code to enable the book-marking feature that makes the whole process faster and more efficient."

"Our base map with all these layers of information is 90 Megabytes - getting close to a Gigabyte in size. The amount of information that´s available there is enormous," says Bedwell. "There are constant updates going on with each of these layers and the information attached to that map. Because of the size of those files, it is completely impossible to update them over the cellular backbone. Our goal is to be able to update given layers of that map in real-time using Avalanche."

The Avalanche client software resides on each of Aurora´s 300 Panasonic Toughbooks (Model CF28). A single instance of the Avalanche server resides at Aurora´s network operating center. Aurora also uses a single instance of Wavelink Mobile Manager installed at the network operating center to remotely manage configuration and updates of the city´s Cisco Aironet Access Points.

Rapid Return On Investment

"Before WiFi, the only way to deliver these updates would be to attach a wire to the portable," says Bedwell. "We are cutting edge here. There are a number of other people looking at what we´re doing. This is a huge metro area with 2.5 million people and numerous cities. Almost all the public safety agencies are in the same boat. CDPD is going away. Everyone is scrambling for more wireless bandwidth."

The public safety division of the city of Aurora is currently planning to add new WiFi access points in several remote police district offices and possibly some fire stations as well. Other departments in the City of Aurora have already installed public WiFi access points on the city´s network backbone at some branch libraries and recreation centers. Bedwell says the city intends to use Wavelink Mobile Manager to centrally control its full inventory of access points, while the public safety portion of the city´s network will remain isolated and protected by VPN encryption for obvious security reasons.

Economically, Bedwell is confident that WiFi has already saved the city money. "I measure success in terms of what it´s going to cost the city in full-time employees to support these critical public safety systems," says Bedwell. "If we can avoid physically touching all those laptops every time we have to do a major software update, I´m saving a huge amount. The return on investment is almost immediate."

ABOUT WAVELINK

Wavelink Corporation is a leading provider of wireless communications software and the developer of a wireless platform that enables enterprises to develop, manage and deploy wireless applications. Since 1992, Wavelink´s innovative software has powered a growing number of Fortune 1,000 companies and is rapidly becoming a standard in wireless network development, deployment and management, with more than 40,000 installations in over 50 countries. Wavelink supports the world´s most popular programming languages and device operating systems, and has extended its expertise from wireless local area networks (WLAN) to the wireless wide area networks (WWAN) space. For more information, please visit www.wavelink.com or call +1-425-823-0111.