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For the past several years, the HPWREN team has been collaborating with the San Diego County Sheriff's Department. Initially, the Sheriff's Department provided the HPWREN team access to several of their remote communications sites throughout the county, which greatly helped with the buildout of the HPWREN backbone network.

More recently, a direct connection to the Sheriff's Primary Systems Center (PSC) of its Regional Communications System enables the Sheriff's staff to experience first-hand the benefits of high performance wireless Internet data networks in remote areas.

The PSC's new 45Mbps connection via HPWREN utilizes a six-foot antenna - located approximately 100 feet up on a tower. The link hops from the Sheriff's tower near central San Diego to San Diego State University and can also reach other HPWREN sites, including the San Diego Supercomputer Center where the HPWREN connectivity originates.

"While the HPWREN connection will allow for technology demonstrations, experiments, and exercises, we also hope that enhanced access to university researchers will enable us to find advanced technologies to respond to incidents and emergencies," says Chris Hinshaw, Assistant Manager of the San Diego County Sheriff's Department's Wireless Communications Office. "Real-time information from deployed sensors, such as being shown with the HPWREN-connected seismology and ecology sites, is becoming more and more critical in our current environment."

"This work also allows our research team to better understand the requirements, applications, and impacts of high performance data emergency communications in a realistic real-world environment," adds HPWREN Principal Investigator Hans-Werner Braun. - Kimberly Mann Bruch

Adapted from information at http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/news/030707.html. For more information on HPWREN, see http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/.