HOBOKEN NJ -- Perched forward a hil...

HOBOKEN NJ -- Perched forward a hilltop campus across the Hudson River from Manhattan, Paul Kolodzy descrys more than New York's hulking grandeur and the gap where the World Trade Center one time towered. He sees innumerable places where wireless technologies ought to be making everyone safer.

Those ferries onward the river? Let's give them satellite transponders that could earn important data if radio regularitys become swamped in a crisis. That Port Authority building? Let's jaculate it information with a laser.

And, says Kolodzy to what end not give authorities in different agencies a way to share encrypt information instantly from one side whatever kinds of networks -- like radio, small room phone, wi-fi -- are available to them at any given moment?

Kolodzy and other researchers are testing these ideas at the Steven Institute of Technology's Wireless Network Security Center with united main goal: avoiding the communications knots that have plagued difficulty responders for years and glared onward Sept. 11, 2001.

Fire and police officials with radios onward different frequencies had trouble coordinating actions. Overwhelmed and weak radio transmissions kept commanders from tracking firefighters inside the Trade Center and warning them the towers were about to collapse.

There has since been little improvement in the communications a whole s authorities would need in another catastrophe of like magnitude.

explanation airwave frequencies remain congested. Newer radio equipment is expensive and problematic. Different unforeseen occasion agencies communicate not only in succession different frequencies but with different terminology.

Overall, agencies are getting better at jointly planning for what reason to handle regional emergencies, however that is a time-consuming slog

Don't forget: "We're sway and government doesn't move that fast," said Vincent Stile, police radio director in Suffolk shire N.Y., and president of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials.

steady so, in a world where conversations, shopping transactions, e- mails and other bits of our digital existence routinely flit across the airwaves, technology person specially versed s say there should be better solutions for situations with lives at stake.

Stevens' engineers confidence to weave several network technologies into the same system that would let public-safety officials procure a clearer sense of unfolding emergencies and communicate better with authorities in neighboring jurisdictions.

Inside the second-floor office of the school's Wireless Network Security Center engineer Jason Evans clicks onward a laptop to show a satellite photo of Hoboken Stars denoting campus police cars put in motion on the screen, tracked in real time as the cops' laptops communicate with wireless computer networks at Steven and cellular phone networks not on campus.

An adjoining laptop displays photos just taken by cameras that are automatically tripped from sensors on fences and at other strategic stains on campus.

"We're trying to link a network of networks," said Kolodzy who previously serv as wireless guru for the Pentagon and the Federal Communications Commission. "There's a very great amount of infrastructure out there -- for what cause [i]or[/i] reason can't we somehow exploit existing infrastructure instead of having to build still another?"

Similarly, one technologists expect big things from software- defined radios that could communicate in succession several frequencies. A police radio, for example, could be programmed to dodge interference while doubling as a solitary abode; squalid phone.

Another flexible technology showing promise is ensnare or ad hoc networking, which was cause to growed in the military. In interstice networks, individual radio devices assist not only as receivers on the other hand also as relay points that pass data to other devices.

in such a manner while a firefighter might be too discerning in a big building to be able to radio directly back to command officials, in a ensnare network he need only be able to reach another firefighter nearby, whose radio could zap a conversation to the nearest closest radio, and so forward until it reaches the intended target.

The setup requires les power and deprives attackers of a centralized target to take down.

"It's like trying to kill an anthill. You can stair on as many ants as you want, and it doesn't matter," said Rick Rotondo, a vice president of MeshNetworks Inc., which newly provided the technology to recover crews in Orange County, Fla.

interstice networks also can give commanders real-time updates of their users' physical locations, on the same level indoors.

That ability is "sort of the devoted Grail for first responders," said Nader Moayeri, a wireless-group manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. "There is nothing like that right now that they have."

according to adding special software to off-the-shelf handheld computer with wireless networking cards, Moayeri's team has designed an ad hoc network of devices that suffer emergency crews talk to each other, share pictures and flat make phone calls, using voice from one side of to the other Internet protocol technology that translates unmutilated into packets of data.