Public Safety Networks from LTE to 5G

14Public Safety Communications Evolution: The Long Term Transition Toward a Desired Converged Future

14.1 Introduction

14.1.1 Toward Moving Public Safety Networks

Fourth generation Long Term Evolution (LTE) stands to be the technology selected by the United States federal and European Union authorities to be used by public safety networks to assist during various emergency scenarios. Since the beginning of Release 11, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has undergone massive developments to enable scalable, robust, and resilient nationwide public safety broadband networks that are crucial during emergency services. The chapter will discuss and highlight the possible public safety use cases with the existing network topologies, the nature of 3GPP standards, and future challenges.

In the United States as well as other countries within the European Union, several vendors such as Ericsson, Nokia‐Alcatel, Huawei, Cisco, Motorola, and Thales are now championing for the use of LTE‐based public safety solutions. Because the current technologies are moving to higher bandwidth, the existing public safety solutions such as Project 25 and terrestrial trunked radio (TETRA) cannot meet the demands and requirements of providing effective and efficient mission‐critical voice communicators because of their pre‐existing design (Sharp et al. 2004). Additionally, the original design for the LTE system, being a commercial cellular network, was not suited in the first 3GPP releases. This ...