In mission-critical real-time communications, ensuring service availability is the top priority. Ensuring availability in digital IP-based infrastructures relies on three key factors: redundancy mechanisms, cybersecurity measures and maintenance processes. Specific product features and associated system design determine the individual performance of each factor.
Rohde & Schwarz ATC solutions offer implementation to ensure maximum service availability. The solutions ensure service continuity by incorporating redundancies into the system, safeguarding it from overloads with resilient design and keeping it up to date to prevent exploits and inconsistencies. By prioritizing these factors, ATC solutions from Rohde & Schwarz provide reliable secure communications infrastructures that meet the highest standards of service availability.
Ensuring future-proof investments
ANSPs are transitioning their operational communications systems to digital technology. The successful implementation of robust digital services and infrastructures is essential for this transformation, which is necessary if ANSPs are to manage the challenges posed by the growing use of airspace.
Digital transformation in the ATC sector has begun implementing digital voice, and the EUROCAE ED-137 standard for voice over IP (VoIP) has been a significant success. It has enabled flexibility and interoperability for mission-critical voice services, paving the way for further digital transformation in ATM.
But migrating from analog to digital services is a complex process that requires careful planning and execution to avoid negative impacts on operational continuity and quality. ANSPs would do well to start this journey by developing a long-term evolution plan, ensuring a clear understanding of the target architecture to avoid overspending, unnecessary complexity or functional limitations.
When replacing ground communications systems, such as radios or voice communications systems (VCS), it is crucial to understand how to achieve high availability of services in digital infrastructures. This knowledge ensures future-proof investments by helping ANSPs select products that support both current migration needs and future requirements. Prioritizing these factors helps ANSPs ensure a smooth transition to digital technology while maintaining the highest level of service availability and quality.
Ensuring service availability
In ATC, ensuring service availability is of the utmost importance and must be maintained at all times and under all conditions. To achieve high availability for a service, the system providing it must be meticulously designed with various factors in mind.
The are some critical factors that determine service availability. The most important are: Redundancy –this can be achieved through various mechanisms on multiple levels; Overload protection: Overloads –are often caused by failures, attacks or misconfiguration; System maintainability – this refers to the system’s ability to be monitored and updated effectively.
Since systems are composed of individual products, these factors also have to be considered at the product level. Without suitable product features, ensuring system-wide service availability is not feasible. That’s why it is crucial to select products that not only meet current needs but also support future requirements for redundancy, overload protection as well as system maintainability.
Redundancy mechanisms
Redundancy is a common approach to enhancing service availability, but it is essential to strike a balance: too little redundancy can put availability at risk, while too much can be costly and add complexity. When considering redundancy mechanisms, it is crucial to prioritize those that are easy to implement, manage and maintain. By carefully selecting the right redundancy mechanisms, ANSPs can improve service availability while keeping costs and complexity under control.
In addition to protocol-centric redundancy mechanisms, system design plays a crucial role in ensuring high availability. This aspect is better characterized by resiliency. A resilient system is designed to minimize the impact of single or multiple failures, which can be caused by attacks, misconfiguration, or catastrophic disasters. Resilient systems are inherently built to handle overload situations, enabling them to continue operating even in the face of significant challenges. By prioritizing resiliency in system design, ANSPs can ensure the highest levels of service availability and reliability, even in the most demanding environments.
CERTIUM products from Rohde & Schwarz not only offer redundancy mechanisms such as linked SIP sessions, dual-homing and Ethernet bonding but also provide best-in-class resiliency and highest service availability through their geo-redundant, distributed system architecture. This design enables CERTIUM VCS to minimize the impact of failures, whether caused by attacks, misconfigurations, or catastrophic disasters, ensuring uninterrupted service even in overload situations. By prioritizing both redundancy and resiliency, CERTIUM products deliver the highest vailability and reliability for mission-critical communications.
Resilient and secure
A service distributed across multiple network elements offers an effective solution for managing overload situations caused by attacks or failures. In such a system, overloads only affect individual elements, while all other elements continue to function as usual, which prevents bottlenecks.
CERTIUM VCS from Rohde & Schwarz embodies this paradigm, providing a highly resilient system for mission-critical voice services. By distributing all VoIP processing to intelligent end-points (controller working positions, or CWPs), CERTIUM VCS eliminates the need for a centralized VoIP processing and switching instance that could be vulnerable to attacks or failures.
In this decentralised architecture, the failure of one end-point does not impact the functioning of any other end-point, similar to peer-to-peer architecture. The decentralised design ensures that even in the event of cyberattacks, the effects of attacks are contained, and the system remains highly resilient to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
CERTIUM VCS from Rohde & Schwarz offers a highly resilient secure solution for mission-critical voice services, ensuring uninterrupted service even in the face of attacks, failures, or overloads.
Monitoring the system
The information and communications technology (ICT) world has shown us that system maintenance in digital infrastructures is more extensive and complex than it is with analog technologies. Regular software updates and patches are necessary to address security vulnerabilities, but the lifespan of hardware components such as servers, routers and switches has decreased, typically to no more than five years. Performance degradation requires close monitoring as does increased complexity due to the flexibility of digital systems that use virtualized resources such as VLAN, VPNs and cloud services.
To simplify maintenance, measures such as live system updates and real-time service monitoring are a boon to network administrators. These practical measures help ensure the smooth and secure operation of digital infrastructure while reducing the administrative burden. By prioritizing maintenance measures, ANSPs can ensure the highest levels of service availability and reliability for mission-critical communications.
Optimal maintainability
System maintenance involves managing the status of a system, handling alarms and configuring settings, which is impractical on a per-device basis. Therefore, a centralized management system is essential for easy administration, configuration and patching from a single point. However, such a central application can also present a single point of failure. To protect these central applications from threats such as denial-of-service (DoS) attacks or disasters affecting entire infrastructure sites, geo-redundancy is the best solution.
CERTIUM VCS combines a distributed design for mission-critical services with a geo-redundant central design for non-critical services. These non-critical services include VCS management and control (VCMS) and optional applications for traffic aggregation and advanced telephony functions. These central CERTIUM VCS services run on standard commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers or in virtualised data center environments, offering maximum failure protection and optimal system maintainability with their built-in geo-redundancy feature.
The software running on geo-redundant CERTIUM VCS systems can be upgraded live during operation. The VCMS can be split in half, with one side remaining operational while the other is detached and updated. Subsequently, CWPs can be gradually migrated to the updated VCMS side, which automatically initiates the self-update process for each CWP. The distributed CERTIUM VCS architecture ensures that this process does not affect any other CWP. Once the second half of the VCMS is updated, the system can be joined back together, ensuring minimal downtime and optimal system maintainability.
Mastering complexity
Digital infrastructures are complex due ot their flexibility and high degree of virtualization. While flexibility is desirable, it can lead to less rigid mapping between devices, functions and locations, as seen in CERTIUM VCS, which lets ATCOs access any radio resource from anywhere, any time.
Virtualisation is also a significant factor contributing to complexity because today’s hardware components often provide only resources and interfaces as a physical underlay. The actual system functions are provided through virtual structures overlaid onto this physical layer, such as VLANs, VPNs and virtual machines.
This increased complexity creates an urgent need for a new type of system monitoring. Traditional solutions that simply monitor the underlying hardware infrastructure are no longer sufficient and carry the risk of service degradations going unnoticed. To prevent a drop in service quality, it is essential to assess the service itself.
Rohde & Schwarz offers the innovative AVQA monitoring solution for this purpose. It continuously monitors all relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) of mission-critical services and simplifies troubleshooting when a degradation occurs. It supports the ED-standards suite and can monitor communications from any ED-compliant network element.
The R&S AVQA voice monitoring solution is unique in the market and provides value to customers by ensuring voice service quality in complex IP infrastructures. AVQA users appreciate the clean, comprehensive overview of the overall system status, which offers peace of mind.
The passive monitoring approach of R&S®AVQA ensures that the monitoring process does not interfere with network traffic and provides accurate and reliable performance data. The solution’s ability to monitor all relevant KPIs of mission-critical services makes it an essential tool for ensuring service availability and reliability, even in the most complex digital infrastructures.
Digital transformation
Digital transformation in ATM is an ongoing process that will continue to build on modern ICT and evolve around digitalisation, becoming more standardized, automated and adaptive to immediate demands. Several technologies are expected to be adopted by the ATM market, including SDN, AI-powered systems, self-healing networks and zero-trust concepts.
The first to be introduced will be SDN, which improves the resilience and security of end-to-end connectivity. Its relevance comes from features such as: The ability to dynamically select paths, enabling load balancing and traffic engineering; Inherent secure transport with IPSec tunnels and the option to multiply streams in order to overcome potential packet losses, and simplified administration of connections based on performance, quality of service (QoS) and redundancy requirements.
The digital transformation journey in ATM is just beginning, and the successful introduction of mission-critical VoIP services is an essential first step. By considering principles such as redundancy, resiliency, overload protection and maintainability, air traffic control organizations can provide high-quality and high-availability services, ensuring the safety and efficiency of ATM.