Defence organisations are increasingly looking to adopt commercially-available solutions to be able to provide secure, opportunistic and resilient network connectivity to deployed staff – whether in a large headquarters, a building of opportunity or a vehicle on the move.

Our experience in researching and developing advanced network capabilities for defence contractors has led us to realise that such solutions must have the ability to self-heal – dynamically reconfiguring themselves as network bearers become available and then degraded or become unavailable. Additionally, there is a significant need for users to easily manage their radio frequency (RF) signature in order to avoid detection by an adversary. For these reasons, UniVirtua developed dashAlpha.

dashAlpha

dashAlpha is an advanced software defined networking platform with a focus on intelligent, seamless, resilient and secure network access across a multitude of bearer technologies all while being simple and easy to use.

Our ‘zero touch’ philosophy with regard to user interaction has resulted in a platform with a simple user interface and a high level of automation to deliver a secure, high-bandwidth network connection with minimal involvement.  dashAlpha enables a user to gain network access by simultaneously using different technologies – such as 5G, LTE, WiFi, DLOS, MANET and SATCOM – to create a single high-bandwidth and secure connection which is resilient to drop-outs and other networking faults.

Additionally, support for RF low-emission technologies such as LiFi (visible and invisible) enables deployed staff to better manage their RF output in hostile locations and ‘blend in’ to an existing electromagnetic environment.  dashAlpha can also integrate with HAIPE devices supporting NCSC Recommended Profile and higher, providing an assured data path between deployed staff and headquarters.

In achieving this – and with support for bonding the UDP protocol – dashAlpha is also able to deliver high bandwidth, resilient, seamless and secure networking for video streaming applications, as well as communications suites such as Microsoft’s Skype and Teams.

Finally, the software-defined nature of dashAlpha enables it to run on a variety of COTS (Commercial-off-the-Shelf) hardware, enabling flexible deployment options; our current hardware solution also supports a hot-swap battery capability.