Better Communication for First Responders

Better Communication for First Responders

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First responders often have trouble communicating with each other in emergencies. They may use different types of radios, or they may be working in rural areas lacking wireless coverage, or they may be deep inside large buildings that block connections.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed Rapidly Deployable Public Safety Research Platform, a mobile array of commercial technologies that can be set up in strategic locations to enable over 200 local users of broadband smart phones, Wi-Fi, data terminals and older walkie-talkie radios to all communicate with each other. Researchers use this self-contained mobile network for research and demonstration projects to improve public safety and emergency communications. The work was funded, in part, by the Department of Homeland Security’s First Responder Group.

NIST has worked with industry partners to integrate the commercial technologies into a mobile wireless communications system. About the size of a large file cabinet, the platform offers more capabilities and faster setup than typical “cell on wheels” systems.

The range is about 4 kilometers in a rural environment. Crucially, the system interconnects Long Term Evolution (LTE) phones, the latest wireless standard, with the public safety community’s traditional Land Mobile Radio (LMR) systems. The nation’s estimated 5 million public safety personnel are expected to use a mix of both systems. LTE data transmission rates are 30 to 1,000 times higher than LMR.

NIST website cites an engineering supervisor in NIST’s Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) Division: “Our role is not to develop the technology itself, but to integrate the state-of-the-art pieces into a conceptual platform that will help drive the industry to meet publicsafety needs—that is, to make portable systems smaller, more robust and with more capabilities”.

The platform was developed through PSCR’s Broadband Consortium, and enables research into factors considered critical to the public safety mission, such as how to establish “push to talk” (i.e., using a button to switch from sending to receiving) capabilities over broadband systems.

The mobile system can also be connected to the internet, satellite or a commercial cellular network to link users to a broader community. PSCR staff are currently exploring integrating sensor data and analytics into the system, and developing requirements for linking up with both personal area networks that are already in place as well as temporary Incident Area Networks, which are created as needed and can expand as an incident grows in size and complexity.