Future wireless emergency response networks with broadband services: requirements, architecture, deployment and management procedures

Local and federal governments have recognized the importance of mobile emergency response networks that can rapidly establish reliable communication links to support multimedia broadband applications. This paper describes a novel proposal for a scalable and flexible architecture to support the needs of such future wireless emergency response networks. We first describe a series of requirements and performance expectations that future wireless network architectures have to satisfy. These requirements then motivate our investigations of several key technical areas. In particular, this paper proposes a novel hybrid network architecture that includes a fixed and permanently deployed part as well as a mobile / portable infrastructure that is deployed as the capacity and connectivity needs arise. The architecture is very flexible and dynamically manages the integration of emergency response applications with municipal and civic services to provide the maximum achievable performance for the latter, while at the same time ensuring the priority and quality of service requirements of the former. Finally we provide some insights into the resource allocation and mobility management strategies and exhibit the differences between emergency response networks and commercial multimedia wireless networks. We conclude with a survey of important technical aspects that need to be addressed and provide initial solutions for some of these problems.