LTE enhancements for Public Safety and Security communications to support Group Multimedia Communications
This work aims to enhance life-saving operations by improving situational awareness through multimedia services for public safety personnel, representing an incremental adaptation of existing technology.
The paper addresses the challenge of adapting commercial Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks to deliver secure and reliable multimedia services, such as video streaming, for Public Safety and Security communications, proposing a solution to support these services over LTE while meeting PMR standards.
Currently Public Safety and Security communication systems rely on reliable and secure Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) Networks that are mainly devoted to provide voice services. However, the evolution trend for PMR networks is towards the provision of new value-added multimedia services such as video streaming, in order to improve the situational awareness and enhance the life-saving operations. The challenge here is to exploit the future commercial broadband networks to deliver voice and multimedia services satisfying the PMR service requirements. In particular, a viable solution till now seems that of adapting the new Long Term Evolution technology to provide IP-based broadband services with the security and reliability typical of PMR networks. This paper outlines different alternatives to achieve this goal and, in particular, proposes a proper solution for providing multimedia services with PMR standards over commercial LTE networks.