DHS awards interoperable-communications contract to Covia

Covia Labs has received a contract from the U.S Department of Homeland Security’ Science and Technology Directorate’s (S&T) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program to research and develop public-safety mobile broadband applications for mission-critical voice.

Under the contract, Covia will start by engaging the public-safety community to understand their requirements for mission- critical interoperable voice communications. It will then develop a plan and deliver software technology that leverages Long Term Evolution (LTE), existing communications systems, and Covia Labs’ Connector interoperability platform to address these requirements. In future phases, this software can be used to build a working system that will operate over LTE on selected commercially available off the shelf (COTS), third-party communications equipment and LMR systems to allow the seamless integration of mobile voice with text, photos, video messaging, GPS, maps and sensors across a wide range of devices.