5G Era 2016 - Special Issue on Future Evolution of Public Safety Communications in the 5G Era

Public Safety (PS) or Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) communications technologies are undergoing significant transformation towards broadband. The Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) as one of the earliest critical communication systems has evolved from slow-speed data in its first release to the current wideband data Tetra Enhanced Data Service (TEDS). TEDS gives higher data rates with up to several hundred kbit/s and very well fits into existing PMR frequency landscape. The APCO25 suite of standards in North America had a similar evolution.
While still providing essential PMR services like voice, group calls and messaging, the evolution of Public Safety communication must include data-rich broadband services to support a wide range of applications to enhance the operational capability of PMR users. Examples of services and applications include remote healthcare, video-streaming health monitoring and so on. In comparison to mobile applications in the consumer market, professional users have severe requirements in terms of signal quality, security, reliability, and coverage. In addition, the usage patterns can be significantly different from the consumer market, as public safety officers must often face unexpected situations (e.g., emergency crisis) and still be able to have full traffic capacity from the networks. The design of future public safety communications must take into consideration these requirements and needs.
Significant advances have been achieved in the last years and are still under development focusing on the use of advanced signal processing techniques using flexible multicarrier waveforms in PMR bands to satisfy emerging new data service needs in cohabitation with existing networks in the same frequency bands, and to facilitate a smooth migration towards broadband systems and to increase spectrum efficiency. One example is Spectrum sharing, which is expected to bring among substantial benefits from flexible and self organised network architectures for a better use of the frequency spectrum which helps to mitigate the severe spectrum scarcity problem (mainly in the EU PS band). However, there are several issues that put a question mark on the deployment of PS systems with fifth generation (5G) communication systems and networks vision.
First of all, the integration of PS system in LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) is still not optimized for voice calls (and especially not for the group calls), meaning that it will have to coexist for some time with the PS for basic voice services. Moreover, LTE-A is still not designed as mission critical system. High availability and security features are not inherent in all the aspects - so some add-ons to the LTE-A standard or implementation scenarios have to be made, especially in the case of future interoperability and usage of commercial 5G networks for PS scenarios. In addition, standards for direct communications, like LTE Device to Device (D2D) or ad-hoc networks must be still validated on the basis of the requirements of security and reliability
With proper implementation of these concepts, public safety users may rely on future 5G systems in the same manner they rely on current narrowband PMR systems. Meanwhile, the design and integration of parallel or complementary usage of traditional PMR systems for voice communication and next generation PS users in 5G systems for mission critical broadband data transfer still remain as open challenges. In particular the research and standardization for internetworking of heterogeneous networks for public safety is still not completed.
This special issue aims at gathering recent advances in all aspects relevant to achieving a smooth migration to future broadband public safety system and its integration in future (5G) communication ecosystem.
Topics of Interest:
Given the above observations, this special issue solicits the submission of original and unpublished manuscripts on relevant topics but not limited to:
■ Visioning the PS communications evolution in future (5G) wireless communications and networks
■ Next generation Software Defined Radio (SDR) PS base stations
■ New network architectures solutions for future PS systems in 5G
■ Future spectrum requirements and usage in future PS systems
■ Advanced techniques for PS coexistence in HetNet environments
■ Enhanced Multicarrier Techniques for PMR Ad-Hoc and cell-based communications
■ PS spectrum usage and intelligent sharing in future 5G context
■ Application of LTE Device to Device (D2D) communication to Public Safety
■ PS interoperability with broadband satellite communications and backhauling
■ Interworking between PMR and Commercial networks
■ Mobile ad-hoc networks for PS
■ Cognitive radio networks and cooperative communications for PS
■ Aerial based access for PS and satellite backhauling for PS
■ Secure communications and threat mitigations for PS
■ Novel protocol architectures for PS communications integrating future (5G) communications
■ Testbeds and proof concepts to facilitate transition to next generation of PS systems
■ New regulatory models, policies, and standardization aspects (ETSI, 3GPP, etc)
■ Economic aspects for future evolution of PS systems in 5G context.
Papers must be tailored to the problems of future evolution of public safety communications and explicitly consider advances on its usage in context of the 5G evolution of wireless communications. The editors maintain the right to reject papers they deem to be out of scope of this special issue. Only originally unpublished contributions will be considered for the issue. The papers should be formatted according to the ETT guidelines (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1541-8251/homepage/ForAuthors.html). Authors should submit a PDF version of their complete manuscript via Manuscript central (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ett) according to the timetable below. When submitting your manuscript, please:
Choose manuscript type “Special Issue paper” (step 1),
Select special issue on: Future Evolution of Public Safety Communications in the 5G Era” (Step2).
Important Dates:
Paper submission deadline: December 15, 2015
Author Notification: March 31, 2016
Final manuscript: May 15, 2016
Guest Editors:
Faouzi Bader, CentraleSupélec, France (faouzi.bader-AT-supelec.fr),
Laurent Martinod, Airbus Defence and Space ? France (laurent.martinod-AT-airbus.com),
Gianmarco Baldini Joint Research Center, European Commission (gianmarco.baldini-AT-jrc.ec.europa.eu),
Fred Frantz Engility Corporation, New York, USA (fred.frantz-AT-engilitycorp.com)
Kandeepan Sithamparanathan Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology -RMIT, Australia (kandeepan.sithamparanathan-AT-rmit.edu.au)
Oriol Sallent Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-UPC, Barcelona, Spain, (sallent-AT-tsc.upc.edu)