Page 98 - Security Today, March 2017

Eye on the Networks
Because of the mission-critical nature of their data, public safety organizations require additional eyes on their network functionality and security
BFy Marty Lamb and Charles Byrd
ast, resilient wireless networks are ideal for public safety operations requiring real-time data, like surveil- lance video streams—but as with any technology used for mission-critical applications, there must be a way to ensure the network always functions.
In any network, changes in performance can creep up over time without detection, until one day a threshold is crossed and suddenly the network is not functioning properly. Manually tracking down an issue can be complicated; sometimes the cause of the problem is something that happened a long time ago, or is an aggregate of small- er problems that individually are innocuous, but create performance issues when combined.
Wireless Network Challenges
A wireless network may start to behave differently if a new device or piece of equipment joins the network and creates extra traffic. Another source of excessive traffic is traffic “leakage” from a wired network, where packets not meant to be on the wireless network end up there anyway.
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Additionally, a user may be unaware that adding a certain applica- tion to a network would affect it, and so would not think to “unplug” it or adjust settings to set things straight. RFID readers and video equipment are examples of benign tools that can create radio fre- quency interference on a network without even joining the network.
So that is where a monitoring and diagnostic system can help: By providing a running baseline of how a network is functioning cur- rently, as well as how it has been functioning over time, these types of tools can detect—and head off—any issues with a public safety organization’s wireless network.
If a network starts having issues (for example, if surveillance vid- eos are pixelated, voice traffic is choppy, or data transfers take lon- ger), a user can pull up the monitoring tool’s graphical interface, de- termine the time something changed and begin to troubleshoot why it changed. This is much easier than having to go through each part of the network individually to find problem areas.
In addition to network performance issues, there are security risks associated with wireless networks that monitoring tools can help to detect.
WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY
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