Background
In today’s digital world, designing and implementing a public safety system requires considering an entire ecosystem, from applications, services, and property and network infrastructure. Deploying a high-quality software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) is essential to operate a public safety ecosystem, which can enhance the speed, efficacy, coverage, and reliability of first responders by enabling citizens and public safety answering points to send and receive voice, text, photos and video communications over a wireless network.
America’s FirstNet nationwide wireless broadband communications platform was created to provide public safety communication tools to help save lives, solve crimes and keep communities and emergency responders safe. With many public safety agencies signing on for FirstNet, building and property owners need to consider upgrading their in-building wireless systems to meet public safety mandates and support the network to work now, and also well into the future.
Mission-critical in-building wireless communications must provide better coverage, which can be disrupted due to building materials, and must support different frequencies and multiple connectivity types, from public safety network 5G/LTE and UHF connectivity, to tenant Wi-Fi and broadband usage.
Requirements
A US-based tier 1 global WAN provider approached Lanner seeking a robust SD-WAN uCPE appliance for real estate SD-WAN. The jointly-developed hardware appliance had to meet the following requirements:
● FirstNet Ready
Must be compatible and verified with FirstNet ReadyTM SIM and Band 14 (700MHz).
● Multi-WAN Support
The device must be able to support a variety of communications options to seamlessly integrate public and private transport and intelligently route traffic to effectively utilize bandwidth, including MPLS, Ethernet, internet, broadband, and 4G/LTE.
● Powerful Performance
The appliance should have multi-core processor architecture and expansion modules for increased performance to run concurrent services, such as Lanner’s NCA-1515 with 2~16 Core Intel® Atom® C3000 Processor (Denverton), and 4x GbE RJ45 with Gen3 bypass ports, 2x SFP with LED ports, 2x GbE RJ45 ports (By SKU), in addition to SR-IOV and DPDK support.
● Wireless Connectivity
The platform must be design ready for 5G Sub-6 and Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), providing active and backup connectivity for high reliability, enabling mission-critical applications to stay connected.
● Software-defined Security
Requires increased visibility, centralized security management and onboard TPM for securing crypto-processing and tamper resistance at the hardware level, further minimizing security risk across the board.
Solution
SD-WAN solutions can manage multiple connectivity types, such as MPLS, wireless, and the commercial internet, while deploying cloud solutions with encryption and security measures, and decrease complexities for one location, or multiple locations. SD-WAN technology allows building/property owners and real estate organization greater networking flexibility and scalability. Most importantly, SD-WAN can prioritize applications, and balance active/inactive connectivity to ensure continuous access to mission-critical cloud-based resources.
The NCA-1515, a desktop network appliance powered by Intel® Atom® C3000 (codenamed Denverton) CPU, features robust performance and Intel’s QuickAssist Technology, offering cryptographic acceleration, multi-WAN architecture, FirstNet LTE modem and commercial-grade LAN functions in a small form factor.