Public Safety Networks from LTE to 5G

Abdulrahman Yarali

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781119579892
• eBook ISBN: 9781119580133
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Mobile & Wireless Communications
• Index: Technology & Engineering

This timely book provides an overview of technologies for Public Safety Networks (PSNs). Including real-life examples of network application and services, it introduces readers to the many public safety network technologies and covers the historical developments as well as emerging trends in PSNs such as today's 4G and tomorrow's 5G cellular network related solutions.

Public Safety Networks from LTE to 5G explores the gradual changes and transformation in the PSNs from the traditional approaches in communications, and examines the new technologies that have permeated this realm, as well as their advantages. It gives readers a look at the challenges public safety networks face by developing solutions for data rates such as introducing broadband data services into safer communication. Topics covered include: TETRA and TETRAPOL; Digital Mobile Radio (DMR), Next-Generation Digital Narrowband (NXDN), Digital Private Mobile Radio (dPMR); and Professional Digital Trunking (PDT). The book also presents information on FirstNet, ESN, and Safenet; Satellite Communications in EMS (Emergency Management) and Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR); Wi-Fi in Ambulances; Technology in Patrol Communications; and more.

1
Public Safety Networks from TETRA to Commercial Cellular Networks

1.1 Introduction

The telecommunications industry has been around for several decades and the changes that have occurred have completely changed how the world operates. In fact, because of the telecoms industry, the entire globe is now connected in one way or another. Legacy and traditional telecoms has also seen lots of “band‐aid” technologies in which legacy equipment is combined with more legacy equipment in order to achieve new contracts or investments. That time is mostly over and the theory is that in the next three years, the entire telecoms industry will switch to more modern and agile platforms. These changes will revolve around and include 4G, artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality, virtual reality, 5G, and cross‐industry alliances. Public safety depends on fast and efficient levels of communication in order to properly relay time‐sensitive and critical pieces of information, which could mean life or death. Unfortunately, many first responders today still rely on fragmented networks and decades‐old wireless tech. They are using land mobile radio (LMR) for the majority of their communications, but the need for a faster, more reliable cellular/mobile communication has arrived. Wireless broadband will most likely be the technology to meet that need.

The Public Safety Group made considerable advances toward fortifying national preparedness and enhancing emergency communications abilities. In the current world we live in, the majority of public safety organizations in the world utilize dedicated communication systems such as terrestrial trunk radio (TETRA), TETRAPOL (a highly spectrum efficient frequency division multiple access [FDMA] technology), and Project 25. These are systems that were discovered more than two decades ago and their primary design was to offer highly reliable and secure mission critical narrowband voice‐centric services to meet the requirements of the public safety communication users. Some of the specialized services provided by these systems include group and priority calls with push‐to‐talk (PTT) future and device‐to‐device communication, among others (TCCA 2018). However, advancements in public safety functions have been challenging over the years. At the moment, the majority of governments, research institutions, and public safety agencies are looking into ways of enhancing communication potential. The voice services at the moment can be considered to be at a satisfactory level because the data transmission capabilities are limited. In the age we live in, having a satisfactory level can be ineffective because of the various telecommunication advancements. This means that the concentration on voice‐centric services has promoted a situation in which technology that is used for public safety communication is underdeveloped as compared to the technology used in the commercial domain in regards to available data rates. In addition, public safety systems are so fragile that they are affecting particular technical decisions that need to be made to ensure connectivity for the users anywhere and anytime. The study shows that the new Long Term Evolution (LTE) functionalities that are in the process of being designed for public safety communications have the potential of replacing TETRA by providing similar functionalities, but at an advanced stage. These new implementations will mean that the LTE architecture will have to get more network entities, especially application servers, because they will assume this role. According to research done by Stojkovic (2016) “the future LTE systems services will match or surpass those of TETRA and ensure they meet the public safety user requirements for the group and device‐to‐device communication by group call system enablers for LTE (GCSE‐LTE), and proximity services (ProSe) functionalities. Moreover, the PTT service can be utilized to assist in mission‐critical push‐to‐talk (MCPTT) in the new technology.” Some of the approaches discussed in this chapter that will take the public safety networks (PSNs) to a whole new level include softwarization and virtualization as defined in software defined networking (SDN). These software networks assist in defining the clear separation between the data and control plane, meaning that there will be a quicker convergence in the newly installed networks, a centralization of policy decisions, and flexibility in reconfiguring network functions whenever there is overload or hardware damage.

PSNs refer to dedicated telecommunication networks used by public safety agencies, for instance, police, fire, emergency, and many more for critical communications (Ferrãos and Sallent 2015a,b,c). In the contemporary world, most public safety organizations use dedicated systems such as TETRA, ARCP Project 25 (P25), and TETRAPOL, all using narrowband technology (Chavez et al. 2015). The design for these systems is built to offer highly reliability and secure narrowband services.

Public service networks often have a very critical objective, especially with human lives depending on the successful exchange of information such as devices location, dispatch services, or alert messages. Fire brigades or police departments are organized in highly mobile groups of individuals respecting a strong hierarchical configuration, which necessitates different levels of priorities and end‐to‐end security. They may work in very harsh environments such as earthquake destruction, fires, or flooding, and are expected to provide relief under any circumstances and in any location. Beyond the voice and specific services that they receive from their rugged mobile devices, PSN users have tended to start taking advantage of more evolved and powerful applications, such as real‐time video, temperature or heart‐rate sensing from their private commercial smartphones (Favraud and Nikaein 2015).

With the consideration that even teenagers own a device much more powerful than first responders, several countries and specialized organizations have launched the definition or funding of the evolution of the PSN. Here, their main aim is to integrate the latest advances of mobile communications and offer technologies at a level equivalent to public commercial networks to their users. For example, in the UK, the Emergency Services Network (ESN) was set to start its deployment in 2016 and their main targets were fire‐fighters and ambulances (NOKIA LTE 2014).

On the other hand, in the US, the FirstNet dedicated LTE network was set to be interoperable, highly reliable and resilient wireless broadband networks to serve police, fire‐fighters, paramedics, and command centers. The TETRA and Critical Communications Association (TCCA) recently selected LTE as the technology to complement TETRA for broadband communications (First Responder Network Authority 2012). Enhancements to LTE and LTE‐Advanced (LTE‐A) have been designed and standardized under Release 12 of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), as described by Doumi et al. (2013), to cope with the additional features necessary to support PSN operations. At the same time, various new technologies aiming to enhance the performance and efficiency of digital communication networks have sprung up in the past years, such as SDN (Wetterwald et al. 2016). It introduces a clear decomposition of control and data plane, which permits one to perform forwarding at flow level according to fine‐grained rules. Secondly, there is also network function virtualization (NFV) and service function chaining (SFC) that complement SDN by adding further flexibility and increasing scalability. Hence it is a natural tendency to propose the benefits of these new technologies to the design of future PSNs.

In this...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgment
• 1 Public Safety Networks from TETRA to Commercial Cellular Networks
• 2 Public Safety Networks Evolution Toward Broadband and Interoperability
• 3 Public Safety Communication Evolution
• 4 Keys to Building a Reliable Public Safety Communications Network
• 5 Higher Generation of Mobile Communications and Public Safety
• 6 Roadmap Toward a Network Infrastructure for Public Safety and Security
• 7 Bringing Public Safety Communications into the 21st Century
• 8 4G LTE: The Future of Mobile Wireless Telecommunication Systems for Public Safety Networks
• 9 4G and 5G for PS: Technology Options, Issues, and Challenges
• 10 Fifth Generation (5G) Cellular Technology
• 11 Issues and Challenges of 4G and 5G for PS
• 12 Wireless Mesh Networking: A Key Solution for Rural and Public Safety Applications
• 13 Satellite for Public Safety and Emergency Communications
• 14 Public Safety Communications Evolution: The Long Term Transition Toward a Desired Converged Future
• Index
• End User License Agreement