The fifth-generation (5G) communication systems will enable enhanced mobile broadband, ultra-reliable low latency, and massive connectivity services. The broadband and low-latency services are indispensable to public safety (PS) communication during natural or man-made disasters. Recently, the third generation partnership project long term evolution (3GPPLTE) has emerged as a promising candidate to enable broadband PS communications. In this article, first we present six major PS-LTE enabling services and the current status of PS-LTE in 3GPP releases. Then, we discuss the spectrum bands allocated for PS-LTE in major countries by international telecommunication union (ITU). Finally, we propose a disaster resilient three-layered architecture for PS-LTE (DR-PSLTE). This architecture consists of a software-defined network (SDN) layer to provide centralized control, an unmanned air vehicle (UAV) cloudlet layer to facilitate edge computing or to enable emergency communication link, and a radio access layer. The proposed architecture is flexible and combines the benefits of SDNs and edge computing to efficiently meet the delay requirements of various PS-LTE services. Numerical results verified that under the proposed DR-PSLTE architecture, delay is reduced by 20 as compared with the conventional centralized computing architecture.
Currently public safety and security communication systems depend on reliable and secure PMR networks that are mainly devoted to provide voice services. However, the evolutionary trend for professional mobile radio (PMR) networks is toward the provision of new value-added multimedia services such as video streaming, in order to improve situational awareness and enhance life-saving operations. The challenge here is to exploit the future commercial broadband networks to deliver voice and multimedia services satisfying PMR service requirements. In particular, a viable solution now seems to be the adaption of the new Long Term Evolution technology to provide IP-based broadband services with the security and reliability typical of PMR networks. This article outlines different alternatives to achieve this goal and, in particular, proposes a proper solution for providing multimedia services with PMR standards over commercial LTE networks.