Mission-Critical Transport Network

The transport network plays a critical role in public safety mission-critical communications infrastructure

With the acceleration of the digital transformation of public safety services, legacy backhaul networks may rapidly become obsolete. They may be unable to optimally support and scale for these new services. In light of this trend, you must:

• Upgrade your narrow-band LMR/PMR voice network to extend its life duration.
• Evolve your public safety network to mobile broadband. or backhaul traffic from your city or county private wireless network.
• Deploy numerous internet of things (IoT) sensors.These includes CCTV and sensors for monitoring gunshots, temperature, pressure, motion, chemicals and other critical public safety systems.
• Securely interconnect public safety buildings and dedicated cloud infrastructure. 

To support such a diverse set of IP-based services, you must migrate to an all-packet network. Doing so will assure the utmost reliability required of mission-critical systems. In addition, you must satisfy the following requirements:

• Your transport network must be multiservice and able to prioritize and manage differentiated quality of service.
• It must have embedded cyber-security mechanisms to protect it from cyber-attacks.
• It must cope with the bandwidth and flexibility required to interconnect public safety cloud-based services and multiple data-centers.
• It must support a smooth TDM to IP migration so that no critical services are ever compromised. 

The key technologies to build such transport networks are a mix of microwave and optical networking solutions supported by multi-protocol label switching (IP-MPLS). Additionally end-to-end transport network orchestration, automation and optimization will be a necessity to achieve optimal performance across different network segments. This will ultimately support network slicing.