Supplement: IEEE 2011 Conference on Technology for Homeland Security: Best Papers
ABSTRACT:
Awarded Best Paper, Attack and Disaster Preparation, Recovery, and Response Track.
In this paper, the authors present a novel solution for the integration of TETRA-based PMR and IP based wireless broadband networks through a novel inter-system interface. This solution enables secure group communications based on PMR standards using heterogeneous devices ranging from a traditional PMR device to smart phones such as the iPhone. Thereby a Smart-phone user will be enabled to leverage on one hand the multimedia data capabilities of 3G and 4G wireless networks (UMTS, LTE) while at the same time be part of a PMR group communication. In other words, any authorized Smart-phone can become part of a PMR communication group by simply downloading the appropriate, dedicated Application. As a key benefit, homeland security personnel can be included in the disaster response actions instantaneously, without necessarily carrying around a PMR device and without the need for PMR coverage. In contrast to existing solutions, the proposed interface solution prevents the reduction of the voice quality when bridging system boundaries by tandem encoding with a TETRA-over-IP (ToIP) interconnection. The presented solutions include different interconnection setups including Trunked Mode (TMO) and Direct Mode (DMO) capabilities. To enable the group communications services as known in PMR systems, a dedicated protocol, the Push-to-X protocol developed by CNI, is leveraged. The results of performance evaluations show that the speech quality is still acceptable even under harsh conditions. The proposed system therefore paves the way towards a future, high performance PMR based on LTE, while preserving backwards compatibility with existing PMR systems.
Suggested Citation
Šubik, Sebastian, and Christian Wietfeld. “Integrated PMR-Broadband-IP Network for Secure Real-time Multimedia Information Sharing.” Homeland Security Affairs, IEEE 2011 Conference on Technology for Homeland Security: Best Papers (May 2012). https://www.hsaj.org/articles/217
This article was originally published at the URL https://www.hsaj.org/?article=0.5.3.
