Mobile Broadband Communications for Public Safety: The Road Ahead Through LTE Technology

Preface

Nowadays, public protection and disaster relief (PPDR) agencies mainly rely on the use of private/professional mobile radio (PMR) technologies (e.g. TETRA, TETRAPOL and Project 25) that were conceived in the 1990s. While PMR systems offer a rich set of voice-centric services, with a number of features matched to the special requirements of PPDR, including push-to-talk and call priority, the data transmission capabilities of these PMR technologies are rather limited and lag far behind the technological advancements made in the commercial wireless domain. In this context, long-term evolution (LTE) technology for mobile broadband PPDR is increasingly backed as the technology of choice for future PPDR communications. Technical work is currently being undertaken within the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), the organization in charge of LTE standardization, to add a number of improved capabilities and features to the LTE standard that will further increase its suitability for PPDR and other professional users, by meeting their high demands for reliability and resilience. While the convergence to common technical standards for the PPDR and commercial domains offers significant opportunities for synergies and economies of scale, the delivery of PPDR broadband services demands new approaches in the way that network capacity is deployed and managed. The current paradigm for PPDR communications, based on ‘dedicated technologies, dedicated networks and dedicated spectrum’, ...