LTE enhancements for Public Safety and Security communications to support Group Multimedia Communications

TL;DR

This paper explores how LTE technology can be adapted to support secure, reliable multimedia communications for public safety, aiming to enhance situational awareness and operational efficiency.

Contribution

It proposes a specific solution for delivering multimedia services over LTE that meets the security and reliability standards of traditional PMR networks.

Findings

Proposed LTE-based multimedia communication solution for public safety.

Enhanced security and reliability in LTE for PMR standards.

Supports video streaming and other multimedia services.

Abstract

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.