Analysis and Evaluation of Secure Solutions for Terrestrial Networks

Abstract

Terrestrial European Trunk Radio Access (TETRA) technology is a European Telecommunication Standard Institute (ETSI) approved standard, designed for public safety applications. TETRA technology has been in service in many developed and developing countries for Fire Fighting, Police Surveillance and Flood Recovery, etc.  Due to its critical use in public safety applications, the requirements for safe, timely and reliable communication are having the utmost importance. The present encryption algorithm (Data encryption standard and Triple DES) computation time is high for fast voice or data communication. In this paper, we are highlighting the state of art TETRA research challenges for secure and reliable communication. Secondly, a secure and robust solution using AES is also analyzed for TETRA based device communication. In the proposed model of evaluation, an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 128-bit key length and 128bit data block using byte substitution and byte-level block processed TETRA communication designed for fast computation to ensure optimal radio resource utilization. The evaluated parameters are SNR, Encryption/Decryption time and varying packet size determine the appropriateness of the AES in comparison to the other encryption techniques. The proposed work is simulated in MATLAB SIMULINK and our evaluation has proved that 128 bit AES end to end encryption is better and more fast, accurate and better than conventional (DES, 3DES) encryption algorithm.