Navy Awards Mayflower SBIR Phase II Contract to Develop Secure Voice over IP (SVoIP) Technology and Demonstrate it on JTRS Radios

The objective of this Navy-funded program is to enable and promote efficient implementation of secure voice communications using the latest networked voice related commercial technologies.

This Phase II program consists of advanced research and engineering development that leads to the delivery of a modular software package that can be ported and demonstrated on JTRS platforms, thus enabling the potential deployment in tactical networks of a Secure Voice over IP (SVoIP) application. This software package referred to as the Secure Voice Core Technology (SVCT) incorporates the Variable Data Rate (VDR) voice encoder developed by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). In addition to the NRL VDR, SVCT package incorporates all the key enabling technologies required for the efficient implementation of the SVoIP-VDR application. These include in addition to the required IP-based call signaling protocols and voice frame processing two essential components, namely: (1) an adaptive VDR rate control scheme and (2) a protocol header compression scheme. In the Phase II we will develop the SVCT package software to run on an advanced handheld radio platform being developed at Mayflower Communications under an Army sponsored SBIR Phase II program known as “MIMO for Energy-Aware Distributed Mobile Wireless Systems (MEADoWS)”.

The successful completion of a modular Secure Voice Core Technology (SVCT) software development so that it can be ported and demonstrated on JTRS platforms and its integration in a SVoIP-VDR demonstration will provide the Navy the capability to prove the feasibility and significance of using a variable data rate voice encoder, the NRL VDR encoder, and other VoIP related technologies, in tactical IP-based networks. Absence of such technologies may render the approach to provide tactical secure VoIP totally unviable. This Navy “owned” and “controlled” solution for the SVoIP-VDR would be an important tool to demonstrate this capability to other military branches. With that, a potential common SVoIP approach could emerge across many military and government users. In addition to the obvious Government needs for secure voice applications, many aspects of the solution would have tremendous commercial impact in the emerging wireless VoIP services.