Communicate on multiple security levels
TactiCall Voice Communication System (VCS) allows military forces to address key communication challenges: shared operations and efficiency, reducing costs and adapting to rapid technical developments and requirements.
Today’s Air Command and Control controllers depend on multi-level secure communications and highly reliable VCS systems and networks to accomplish their missions. TactiCall VCS meets both the information security and safety requirements in one system for mission critical applications.
The VoIP based TactiCall VCS enables secure and full featured Ground/Air (G/A) and Ground/Ground (G/G) communications, supporting the latest international EURACAE standards RD 136-138 for VoIP based VCS and EUROCAE ED-153 for safety.
TactiCall VCS enables multiple autonomous and redundant centres to be operated and redundant centres to be operated and managed as one VCS service, irrespective of their geographical location and without compromising security and safety.
Ground/Air
In order to support different mission needs, TactiCall VCS features multi-level secure G/A communication. A conversation with a fighter aircraft can start as non-secure and during the conversation be switched to e.g. national or NATO secret conversation “Go Secure – by a single touch”.
For cost effective multi-level secure radio operations and easy crypto key management, TactiCall facilitates crypto pools for dynamic sharing of cryptos physically secured in the VCS centre.
Ground/Ground
Multi-national air defence operations requires multiple missions with access to communication and networks of different security levels. TactiCall VCS supports multi-level secure loop intercom and multi-level secure telephony. In this way, controllers can coordinate on national secret loop conferences and at the same maintain communication on e.g. NATO secret defence networks and unclassified communication channels to civil Air Traffic Services (ATS).
Intuitive user interface
The Controller Working Position (CWP) is the voice controller access to the VCS. It provides a graphical user interface, enabling high flexibility in mission planning and execution. The CWP enables the controller to control the on-going communication, select and deselect different types of air and ground communication connections.
The CWP is either configured with a single touch panel or dual touch panels:
- Single panel – the CWP panel will contain both G/G AND G/A communication connections.
- Dual panels – the dual CWP panels will split G/G and G/A communication connections between the panels, displaying all G/G/ on one panel and G/A on the other panel.
Robust and future proof
TactiCall VCS uses highly resilient and distributed system architecture. The architecture is designed to eliminate single points of failure and maintain safety critical communication services for very high reliability. TactiCall VCS supports parallel operating redundancy, using two fully duplicated and independent communication paths via redundant LAN,WAN and VCS radio servers – instead of a hot standby redundancy, often used in other VCS systems.
TactiCall VCS is built using future proof container-based microservice architecture in order to add efficiency, reliability, and security to the software development lifecycle and simplify deployment and IT maintenance.
Information security
Saab suppliers TactiCall Secure Voice systems NATO countries with support for all four security domains in the same system. Requirements for multi-level secure communication and the ability for controllers to simultaneously coordinate on multiple security levels is an upcoming requirement in a modern military warfare.
For additional information security, the TactiCall VCS installations can be supplied as NATO TEMPEST certified. The Emission Security designs and installations are carried out according to TEMPEST standards SDIP-29 and SDIP-27 where applicable, and up to strictest TEMPEST Level A.
Cyber Security
In addition to Information security measures, it is important to protect the critical VCS infrastructures against cyber-attacks. TactiCall VCS features both host and network based firewalls to protect the individual VCS components and supports encryption of all IP traffic between all the VCS components, IP networks and the remote located radios.
VCS Secure Voice Communication
TactiCall VCS is built to facilitate the chain of command. Naval and military communication requires RED and BLACK separation as well as security accreditation of the overall solution.