Network Modeling for Public Safety Communications

Summary

To provide the public safety community with a better understanding of what to expect from new and emerging networking technologies, and accelerate the standardization and utilization of such technologies.

Description

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Advances in broadband wireless technologies developed by standard developing organizations (SDOs) such as 3GPP and IEEE 802 offer unprecedented capabilities that have the potential to improve the effectiveness of first responders. Our efforts are aimed at evaluating how well emerging solutions meet current public safety needs, and what improvements if any are needed to meet future needs.

Goals

We provide the public safety community with the performance analysis tools needed to better understand emerging network technologies. Our efforts facilitate:

• the evaluation of worst/best case network deployment scenarios,
• the investigation of how well new technologies support public safety requirements,
• the development of quantitative requirements for public safety communications.
• the development of next generation network standards in support of public safety communication needs.

Current focus includes following topics:

Device-to-Device (D2D) Communications

D2D technologies enable Direct Mode communication for first responders even when the network infrastructure is unavailable…

Mission Critical Communications

The situations under which first responders are communicating necessitate more stringent performance and availability requirements…

Open-source Simulation Tools

Open-source software accelerates collaboration by making it easily accessible to other researchers in both industry and academia…

This work is part of the Public Safety Communications Research program.

 

Major Accomplishments

• Participating in 3GPP working groups (SA1, SA6, CT1, and RANs) and contributing to the development of MCPTT and ProSe (over 100 contributions). The team received a NIST Bronze Medal in 2018 recognizing the work in the standardization of Mission Critical Voice over LTE in support of public safety communications.
• Over 20 peer-reviewed publications on the evaluation and improvement of MCPTT and ProSe capabilities.
• Developed an open source modeling tool based on ns-3 simulation platform focusing on public safety operations. Main features include MCPTT application, ProSe capability, and incident scenarios.