IEEE Communications Magazine • October 201152

GUEST EDITORIAL

nteroperability and security between allies are the key chal-lenges in military communications. In spite of standardiza-

tion efforts and independent national purchase policies, it ishard to make the communication systems in coalition forcesshare information. Since the forces’ operations involve lethaldecisions, the demand for trust, secrecy, and authentication isextremely high. The need for quick decisions based on com-plete and up-to-date information, makes these challengestricky. The good news on military research programs is thatthey are long term and involve considerable funding.

In this issue the challenges of interoperability are tackledby seeking to find common waveforms for software radiorather than designing a common radio. The idea is that thesewaveforms may run on many hardware platforms as long asthey adhere to joint specifications. There is therefore a needto find a joint software communications architecture (SCA).

In one of the articles in this year’s Feature Topic, theresults of a European Commission funded project, EULER,are presented. The main result is the definition of a commonwaveform that respects the software communications technol-ogy to support emergency response to natural disasters, whichrequires the participation of different public safety and mili-tary organizations, potentially of different nations.

In another article, which has been deferred to the Novem-ber issue because it was revised too late, the multinationalprogress in development of a narrowband tactical radio wave-form is reported. This waveform will be contained inside a 25kHz channel at VHF and only supports a simplex link.

There are three articles on security. One argues that threelevels of authentication are needed to guarantee correctauthentication in tactical ad hoc networks. Another article pre-sents an architecture to support tactical deployment of smart-phones with the aid of base stations and cellular technologyfrom commercial systems. The third article addresses some ofthe unique situations that HAIPE crypto technology intro-duces to networking and the network management challenges.

Distributed unattended ground sensor (UGS) networks usedin battlefield surveillance and monitoring missions, have provento be valuable in providing a tactical information advantagerequired for command and control, intelligence, surveillance,and reconnaissance planning. The final article presents a net-working and application interface technology for UGS.

In this year’s call, we received 10 papers, and five wereaccepted. We encourage papers in the field of military com-munication to be submitted before 1 April 2012.

BIOGRAPHIESTORLEIV MASENG (torleiv.maseng@ffi.no) is director of research at the Nor-wegian Defense Research Establishment, where he is responsible for com-munications and information systems. He worked as a scientist at SINTEFin Trondheim for 10 years, involved in design and standardization ofGSM. For seven years he was a scientist at the NC3A NATO research cen-ter in The Hague. During 1992–1994 he was involved in the startup ofthe new private mobile operator NetCom GSM in Norway, where he hadtechnical responsibility. Since 1994 he has held a chair in radio communi-cations at University of Lund, Sweden. In 1996 he took up his employ-ment at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (FFI) located atKjeller, 20 km outside Oslo. Since 2005 he is also Professor II at the Uni-versity of Oslo. He is the author of more than 150 papers, holds patents,and is a Technical Editor of IEEE Communications Magazine. He hasreceived an award for outstanding research and has arranged large inter-national conferences.

RANDALL LANDRY (rlandry@mitre.org) received his M.S. and Ph.D. in elec-trical engineering from the University of Vermont in 1992 and 1994. Heis currently with the MITRE Corporation in Bedford, Massachusettswhere he serves as Program Director for a portfolio of programs thatdeliver ground-based communications capabilities to Air Force users ingarrison and deployed. He has also served as Department Head forCommunications and Networking and conducted research in support ofthe U.S. Department of Defense. As a member of Corporate R&D atTexas Instruments in Dallas, TX he was previously involved in researchand development of highly integrated switching architectures for Giga-bit networking and he holds several patents in this area. He has alsoserved as Director of Optical and Wireless Networking in the Telecom-munications industry. He has been the principal investigator on a num-ber of research programs ranging from satellite communications totactical wireless networking. Recent research interests focus on net-work science, autonomic networking, cross-layer design methodologies,dynamic resource management in wireless networks, and the perfor-mance evaluation of multi-hop wireless networks. He has publishednumerous technical articles and served as technical program committeemember and session organizer for the major IEEE Communications Soci-ety conferences.

KENNETH YOUNG [SM] is executive director for Government Project Develop-ment in the Applied Research organization at Telcordia Technologies, Pis-cataway, New Jersey. He received his B.S. in physics from St. Joseph’sUniversity, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Penn-sylvania. His research interests are in the design and application ofmobile ad hoc networking technology for tactical environments. He is theprogram manager for the Army Research Laboratory’s Communicationsand Networks Collaborative Technology Alliance, a government-industry-academic consortium that performs basic research in survivable wirelessmobile networking, signal processing, and tactical information protection.He heads another team developing advanced mobile technology underthe U.S. Army CERDEC’s Proactive Integrated Link Selection for NetworkRobustness program. He chairs the Communications Society’s TacticalCommunications and Operations Technical Committee, and is on theadvisory board for the Military Communications (MILCOM) Conference.He is a Telcordia Fellow.

MILITARY COMMUNICATIONS

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Torleiv Maseng Randall Landry Kenneth Young

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