Situational
Awareness

Situational Awareness

Situational awareness is the ability to perceive, understand and plan ahead for what is happening in one’s environment. It is a crucial skill for emergency responders, civilians, and military personnel, who operate in complex and dynamic situations such as natural disasters, crime scenes or mass events.

Knowledge and understanding of the current situation which provides timely, relevant and accurate assessment of activities and scenarios in a particular location, or locations, in order to facilitate decision making.

Situational awareness helps people make better decisions based on accurate information about their surroundings. This can be applied to any scenario where multiple actors, communication systems and control centres are involved, sometimes over a large geographic area:

In natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes or wildfires, situational awareness can help rescue teams coordinate their efforts, locate victims and resources, avoid hazards, and communicate with local authorities.
In crime scenes such as shootings, bombings or hostage situations, situational awareness can help law enforcement officers identify suspects, secure evidence, protect civilians and collaborate with other agencies.
In mass events such as sports games, concerts or protests, situational awareness can help security personnel monitor crowd behaviour, detect threats, manage traffic and respond to emergencies.

Command-and-Control-Centres need the most accurate and up to date information about the situation on the ground.  This may be achieved through specialist applications and equipment such as body worn cameras or by commercial CCTV products.

In all these cases, situational awareness improves the safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of the actions taken by the different stakeholders. However, situational awareness is not easy to achieve or maintain.

Amongst the many challenges that hinder situational awareness communications breakdown is a major one. The lack of interoperability between different systems, platforms or networks can prevent effective information sharing among different actors, potentially leading to misunderstandings, misinterpretations, or misinformation.

Overcoming these challenges requires a generic approach providing fast, reliable and secure data links for these organisations and their critical applications, incorporating different network services such as terrestrial, cellular and satellite without being limited by underlying physical assets.

connected vehicles, emergency service vehicle

RazorLink is ideally suited to the requirement for fast response and dependable connectivity demanded by Situational Awareness organisations. For example, RazorLink can enable “eyes on the ground” for operations centres managing disaster relief logistics, as well as managing football crowds, demonstrations, or open-air concerts.

RazorLink offers a true Hybrid WAN, optimised across a wide variety of physical networks, combining services offering resilience, intelligent bandwidth management, fallback, all the while providing end-to-end encryption.

RazorLink facilitates establishing trustful relationships among different actors and stakeholders that support effective information sharing and coordination, by providing seamless, resilient communications across a variety of networks, standards, protocols, and platforms, as well as different software applications and control centres.

To have situational awareness is a vital capability for anyone who operates in complex and dynamic environments with fast-changing conditions – and by effective communications, people can improve their ability to perceive, understand and anticipate their environment and make better decisions accordingly.

Livewire Digital has developed RazorLink Smart Networking, a Software Defined Networking (SDN) solution that can integrate cellular, satellite and terrestrial communication services.

RazorLink provides a seamless transition between services providing full IP mobility; it can combine networks for additional bandwidth and secure the link, encrypting data end-to-end whatever route the traffic takes. RazorLink accelerates TCP, improving performance over high latency satellite, poor quality cellular and intermittent Wi-Fi links.

Data and link prioritisation makes it feasible for critical data to be given precedence over background updates and can deliver low latency video streams giving control and operations centre staff better situation awareness. Remote access can be realised without the complexity, overhead and poor performance of VPN-based architectures.

RazorLink is a software solution that can be deployed on COTS hardware or embedded alongside firmware in the customer’s hardware, or deployed like a router (physical or virtual). RazorLink can be embedded into specialist equipment and software applications to ensure all the bandwidth can be used to deliver telemetry, imagery and high-quality, lower-latency video feeds.

For example, a RazorLink router can provide seamless, bonded bandwidth to off-the-shelf CCTV products, as well as be built into a Drone for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR). The counterpart can be run on dedicated hardware or on secured virtualised Private or Public Cloud services.

Seamless connectivity for situational awareness

Situational Awareness

Situational Awareness

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