Multiagency cooperation in cross-border operations

MACICO was started to develop a concept for interworking for security organisations in their daily activity. It dealt with cooperation of security organisations that do not use (in their day-to-day job) the same radio network, but in some missions could take benefit from a sharing of their respective infrastructure. MACICO studied use cases such as pursuit of criminals across a border, close support of vehicles going through a border, and disaster relief operations require security organisations from both countries to communicate together and to continue to communicate with their control room.

The members of an organisation must be allowed to use the foreign radio network to communicate. But the way to organize this foreign use of a radio network was to be defined and validated by security organisation authorities.

The work of the project was carried out in cooperation with the public safety organisations that were in charge of defining under which conditions members from foreign organisations a priori working on heterogeneous networks will be able to cross the borders and how and to whom they shall communicate, without putting in danger the security features of the radio network.

The requirements for these communications were led on concrete use cases (such as France-Spain, France–Belgium, Switzerland-Germany, Switzerland-France and Finland-Estonia borders; content and demo location were discussed in the frame of the project). Interworking at the border would then address Tetra-Tetrapol, Tetra-Tetra, and Tetrapol-Tetrapol interworking as well. From these requirements, the definition on the way to deploy terminals to foreign organisations, the way to organize and to deploy the solutions including gateways, was declined in any of interworking cases.

The test bed developed in the project would consist of proving the capability for the users to exploit the foreign radio network to communicate with all the members of the "border" community (radio from both networks, control room from both networks). Development of the necessary "gateways" that would allow the communication across the border would be part of the test.

The project was innovative because it addressed not only the interoperability issue, but also the complete procedure that accepts foreign users on a security radio network (which is a priori forbidden for them) and looked for a solution that would keep the intrinsic security mechanisms of such networks. Moreover MACICO paved the way towards the development of strong and meaningful interactions between narrowband public safety and LTE broad band networks.

Results of the project were published in MACICO - Multi-Agency Cooperation In Cross-border Operations Samples of Evidence Series: Volume 4., eds. Kämppi, P., Rajamäki, J., Tiainen, S. & Leppänen, R.