Locked Down: Municipal Public Safety Departments See Benefits in Kinetic Mesh Wireless Networks

Kinetic Mesh’s secure, mobile network can aid law enforcement, surveillance efforts

• By Marty Lamb, Don Gilbreath
• Apr 01, 2016

Modern municipalities tackle many obstacles, ranging from small, like keeping pigeons off a statue of the town founder, to large, like maintaining and upgrading infrastructure – all within budgets that get tighter every year. According to Rand, “Many state and local governments are facing significant fiscal challenges, forcing policymakers to confront difficult trade-offs as they consider how to allocate scarce resources across numerous worthy initiatives.”

Public safety should not be one of those trade-offs, and finding affordable technologies that help keep citizens safe is a goal for local governments across the country. As public safety and security technologies continue to advance, some municipalities are turning to a wireless network called Kinetic Mesh.

Kinetic Mesh has been implemented in such rugged environments as mining, military, and oil and gas operations. Many wireless networks use static infrastructure like access points, towers or wireless routers, while the people and vehicles on the network are always on the go; in Kinetic Mesh, everything is constantly moving – including the infrastructure – and can come and go as needed, allowing use in dynamic environments.

At any given time, there can be thousands of possible routes through a Kinetic Mesh network with even just a handful of wireless nodes. In a Kinetic Mesh network environment, each node is connected to many nodes. Kinetic Mesh maintains huge numbers of simultaneous links to adjacent peers and the nodes constantly reevaluate what routes are the best paths for any given packet of information. If one route becomes unavailable for any reason – interference, loss of power, congestion – the next packet takes a faster route around the problem. Every node can make a fully independent decision, and it is not uncommon for a node to have several hundred peer connections, giving it the ability to use any link at any time.

Kinetic Mesh, Security and Privacy

In addition to being highly mobile and reliable, Kinetic Mesh allows a secure, private backbone to transmit whatever type of traffic – video, data, voice – a user requires, while also detecting tampering and supporting encryption of data security.

When people think about wireless security, they often think about authentication and encryption between a client device (like a laptop or phone) and the access point or router the device talks to. That type of encryption secures the link between the device and access point, but then, away from the access point, information is decrypted and sent on its way.

Kinetic Mesh offers the same type of encryption that wireless clients require for Wi-Fi as well as end-to-end encryption. When encrypted information flows through the mesh and comes out another node, it stays encrypted all the way through, and is not decrypted until it is delivered to its final destination, ensuring privacy.

At each hop in the network, Kinetic Mesh provides a per-hop authentication for each packet, as well as secure authentication of message. This detects if data is tampered with while ensuring a packet of information received by a node came from a trusted peer. This protects from a type of cyber-attack called packet injection, when attackers try to “throw” packets into the network to disrupt traffic.

Metadata encryption is another feature of Kinetic Mesh, and was implemented at the request of the military. Kinetic Mesh encrypts data so that as it flows through the network, an attacker cannot analyze the traffic and see which nodes are communicating with which other devices.

Kinetic Mesh’s security features can benefit public safety and law enforcement in a municipality, especially in the realms of emergency operations and the capturing and processing of video.

Emergency Operations Facilitation

A Kinetic Mesh network’s mobility means that nodes can be placed in police, fire and emergency vehicles as well as in static locations, and the network travels with the vehicles. For example, three vehicles driving down a road with nodes in them are all connected to each other as well as to any nodes on poles, drones flying overhead, etc., and all work in concert. If another vehicle with a node joins, the network adjusts immediately and that vehicle is then connected.

During emergency operations, any vehicle with a node in it can be the first on the scene and act as the first broadcast point for all other emergency personnel and vehicles arriving; a wireless network that runs point to point would require getting the vehicle with the access point to the scene first. This mobility also allows a faster response time as well as proactive intervention. In the case of a flood or widespread fire, even if multiple utility poles with nodes attached go down, the network reroutes and stays up.

Security Video Applications

Many municipalities are eager to improve the quality and quantity of their security video, but budgetary constraints cripple efforts to upgrade control rooms and add infrastructure such as cameras.

Kinetic Mesh facilitates distributed video processing by supporting HD video processing at the network edge. Surveillance cameras plug into a node that has powerful computer processing power as well as a terabyte of solid state memory. High-definition video from the camera is stored in the wireless node on the utility pole and can be accessed directly from a Web browser without additional processing, enabling control room functionality from anywhere. Nodes can also be added to police cars with dashboard cameras and as the cars move around town, that video joins the data stream.

Cities do not necessarily need to have a lot of money in the budget to start implementation; they can start with just a few assets, being strategic about where they place them, and add more over time – and Kinetic Mesh’s scalability means that any number of cameras can be added at any time, improving the network without any reconfiguration. This is helpful to city planners, who often need to think years into the future when retrofitting or adding new infrastructure.

There is also a public service element to having cameras on a Kinetic Mesh network, as the cameras can be used for functions like detecting empty parking spaces in real time.

Having the cameras on the Kinetic Mesh network also can assist in legal proceedings. After an incident, occasionally a police officer takes the security video off a camera on a pole and stores it in a hard drive or on a desktop computer. This can interfere with the chain of evidence in a court case, as it could be argued that the video was tampered with at some point between coming off the pole and arriving in court.

Video on a Kinetic Mesh network comes with cryptographic assurance that data flowing through the network has not been tampered with, which can help court cases by proving the video is accurate.

The wireless nodes have the technical capacity to allow implementation of ancillary public safety features such as license plate or facial recognition software. The software could be embedded into the wireless node itself and run on the network. The terabyte of storage in each node would allow for these applications as well as 30 days of high-definition video storage.

Case in Point: Media, Pa.

Media, Pa., installed a six-camera network running on Rajant’s Kinetic Mesh wireless network in October 2014. Media has budget challenges like many small towns, and the scalability of the Kinetic Mesh network and wireless nodes meant it could strategically implement video assets in a few key areas.

The six-camera installation allows video surveillance and also acts as a police force multiplier for the borough; police officers cannot be everywhere at once, so placing high-definition cameras in important areas is like having extra boots on the ground.

The town’s businesses also leveraged the Kinetic Mesh network by allowing their own security cameras to tie into the common network, creating an open architecture that can help in the event of a crime.

One clear example of how the small town saw the investment pay off came after a crime committed in February 2015, in which a man assaulted a woman and fled the scene. The incident was captured on a CacheCrumb, a high-definition edge video processor node located on a nearby utility pole camera.,  The video could not have been altered or tampered with in any way due to the innate security of the Kinetic Mesh network, and was able to be used as evidence in the court case.

Many municipalities and cities face the same budget and staff constraints as Media. Implementing a scalable, mobile solution that is highly secure and allows access to the latest data can help local governments make more informed decisions, provide better emergency operations and ensure safety for its citizens.