New Jersey Officials Try to Aid Emergency Technology

HOBOKEN, N.J. (AP) _ Researchers are testing ideas aimed at avoiding communications problems that have plagued emergency workers for years and became especially apparent on Sept. 11, 2001.

Perched on a hilltop campus across the Hudson River from Manhattan, researcher Paul Kolodzy sees more than New York's hulking grandeur and the gap where the World Trade Center once towered. He sees innumerable places where wireless technologies ought to be making everyone safer. Those ferries on the river? Let's give them satellite transponders that could get important data if radio systems become swamped in a crisis. That Port Authority building? Let's send it information with a laser.

And, says Kolodzy, why not give authorities in different agencies a way to share encrypted information instantly through whatever kinds of networks _ like radio, cell phone, Wi-Fi _ are available to them at any given moment.

Kolodzy and other researchers are testing these ideas at the Stevens Institute of Technology's Wireless Network Security Center with one main goal: avoiding the communications knots that glared on Sept. 11.

Fire and police officials with radios on different frequencies had trouble coordinating actions. Overwhelmed and weak radio transmissions kept commanders from tracking firefighters inside the Trade Center and warning them the towers were about to collapse.

There has since been little improvement in the communications systems authorities would need in another catastrophe of such magnitude.

Key airwave frequencies remain congested. Newer radio equipment is expensive and problematic. Different emergency agencies communicate not only on different frequencies but with different terminology.

Overall, agencies are getting better at jointly planning how to handle regional emergencies, but that is a time-consuming slog.

``Don't forget: We're government, and government doesn't move that fast,'' said Vincent Stile, police radio director in Suffolk County, N.Y., and president of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials.

Even so, in a world where conversations, shopping transactions, e-mails and other bits of our digital existence routinely flit across the airwaves, technology experts say there should be better solutions for situations with lives at stake.

Stevens' engineers hope to weave several network technologies into one system that would let public-safety officials get a clearer sense of unfolding emergencies and communicate better with authorities in neighboring jurisdictions.

Inside the second-floor office of the school's Wireless Network Security Center, engineer Jason Evans clicks on a laptop to show a satellite photo of Hoboken. Stars denoting campus police cars move on the screen, tracked in real time as the officers' laptops communicate with wireless computer networks at Stevens and cellular phone networks off campus.

An adjoining laptop shows photos just taken by cameras that are automatically tripped by sensors on fences and at other strategic spots on campus.

``We're trying to link a network of networks,'' said Kolodzy, who previously served as wireless guru for the Pentagon and the Federal Communications Commission. ``There's a huge amount of infrastructure out there _ why can't we somehow exploit existing infrastructure instead of having to build yet another?''

Similarly, some technologists expect big things from ``software-defined'' radios that could communicate on several different frequencies. A police radio, for example, could be programmed to dodge interference while doubling as a cell phone.

Another flexible technology showing promise is ``mesh'' or ``ad hoc'' networking, which was developed in the military. In mesh networks, individual radio devices serve not only as receivers but also as relay points that pass information on to other devices.