Elsevier

Physical Communication

Volume 41, August 2020, 101109
Physical Communication

Full length article
Surveying pervasive public safety communication technologies in the context of terrorist attacks

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.phycom.2020.101109Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Abstract

Existing public safety networks (PSNs) are not designed to cope with disasters such as terrorist attacks, consequently leading to long delays and intolerable response times. First responders’ life threats when accessing the attacked zone are more severe in comparison to other disasters and the accuracy of basic information such as the number of terrorists, the number of trapped people, their locations and identity, etc., is vital to the reduction of the response time. Recent technologies for PSNs are designed to manage natural disaster scenarios; these are not best suited for situations like terrorist attacks because a proper communication infrastructure is required for operating most of the classical PSNs. This serious concern makes it highly desirable to develop reliable and adaptive pervasive public safety communication technologies to counter such a kind of emergency situation. Device-to-device (D2D) communication can be a vital paradigm to design PSNs that are fit for dealing with terrorist attacks thanks to long-term evolution (LTE)-sidelink, which could allow the devices that people carry with themselves in the attacked zone to communicate directly. To our best knowledge, this is the first survey paper on public safety communication in the context of terrorist attacks. We discuss PSN scenarios, architectures, 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) standards, and recent or ongoing related projects. We briefly describe a system architecture for disseminating the critical information, and we provide an extensive literature review of the technologies that could have a significant impact in public safety scenarios especially in terrorist attacks, such as beamforming and localization for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), LTE sidelink for both centralized (base-station assisted) and decentralized (without base-station) architectures, multi-hop D2D routing for PSN, and jamming and anti-jamming in mobile networks. Furthermore, we also cover the channel models available in the literature to evaluate the performance of D2D communication in different contexts. Finally, we discuss the open challenges when applying these technologies for PSN.

Keywords

Pervasive public safety communication (PPSC)
Critical communication
Long-term evolution (LTE) sidelink
Device-to-device (D2D) communication
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
Localization
Beamforming
Software-defined networking
Routing protocols

Cited by (0)

Ali Masood received his M.Sc. degree in Advanced Electronic Systems Engineering from University of Burgundy, France, in 2017. He was a Research Engineer at Inserm U1253 (Imaging and Brain), INSA Centre Val de Loire, France from March 2017 to October 2017. Currently, he is working towards his Ph.D. at Thomas Johann Seebeck Department of Electronics, School of Information Technology, Tallinn University of Technology. His domain of research is Cooperative Device to Device Communication for Emergency and Critical Wireless Communication System.

Davide Scazzoli was born in Italy, in 1989. He received a M.Sc. degree in Telecommunications Engineering in the year 2016 from Politecnico di Milano defending a thesis on the implementation of Wireless Sensor Networks for avionic applications. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the field of Telecommunications Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano. His research interests are Wireless Sensor Networks, redundancy management and localization.

Navuday Sharma received his M-Tech in avionics engineering from Institute of Space Science and Technology, Amity University, Uttar Pradesh, India, in 2015 and Ph.D. degree in telecommunication engineering from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bio-engineering (DEIB), Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 2018. He was also a Research Engineer at Infocomm Lab, School of Computer Science and Robotics, Tomsk Polytechnic University, Russia, from Oct 2017 to June 2018. Currently, he is working as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Thomas Johann Seebeck Department of Electronics, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia. He has worked on wireless communication with aerial base stations for 5G systems and currently working towards ultra-reliable low latency communication. His other research interests are channel modeling, multi-carrier communication, digital signal processing and internet of things.

Yannick Le Moullec received the M.Sc. (EE) degree from Université de Rennes I (France) in 1999 and the Ph.D. (EE) degree from Université de Bretagne Sud (France) in 2003. From 2003 to 2013 he successively held postdoc, assistant, and associate professor positions at Aalborg University (Denmark). He then joined Tallinn University of Technology (Estonia) as a senior researcher, where he now holds a professorship in electronics. He has supervised 11 PhD theses and 50+ M.Sc. theses. He is Co-PI for the H2020 COEL ERA-Chair project. He is a member of the IEEE Sustainable ICT Community. His research interests span HW/SW co-design, embedded systems, reconfigurable systems, and IoT.

Rizwan Ahmad received M.Sc. degree in Communication Engineering and Media Technology from the University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany in 2004 and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia in 2010. From 2010 to 2012, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Qatar University on a QNRF grant. He is currently working as Assistant Professor at School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, National University of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan. His research interests include medium access control protocols, spectrum and energy efficiency, energy harvesting and performance analysis for wireless communication and networks. He has published and served as a reviewer for IEEE journals and conferences. He also serves on the TPC of leading conferences in the communication and networking field, including, e.g. IEEE VTC, IEEE ICC, IEEE Globecom. He is a member of IEEE. He was the recipient of the prestigious International Postgraduate Research Scholarship from the Australian Government.

Luca Reggiani received the Ph.D. in Electronics and Communications Engineering in 2001 from Politecnico di Milano (Italy). He has collaborated with several industries and Universities in the field of wireless communications and magnetic recording, as a consultant or within Italian and European research programs. His research interests include cellular systems, wireless sensor networks, high capacity point-to-point links, information theory.

Maurizio Magarini received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electronic engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, in 1994 and 1999, respectively. In 1994, he was granted the TELECOM Italia scholarship award for his M.Sc. Thesis. He worked as a Research Associate in the Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria at the Politecnico di Milano from 1999 to 2001. From 2001 to 2018, he was an Assistant Professor in Politecnico di Milano where, since June 2018, he has been an Associate Professor. From August 2008 to January 2009 he spent a sabbatical leave at Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, Holmdel, NJ. His research interests are in the broad area of communication and information theory. Topics include synchronization, channel estimation, equalization and coding applied to wireless and optical communication systems. His most recent research activities have focused on molecular communications, massive MIMO, study of waveforms for 5G cellular systems, wireless sensor networks for mission critical applications, and wireless networks using UAVs and high-altitude platforms. He has authored and coauthored more than 100 journal and conference papers. He was the co-recipient of four best-paper awards. Since 2017 he has been an Associate Editor of IEEE Access and a member of the Editorial Board of Nano Communication Networks (Elsevier). In 2017 he also served as Guest Editor for IEEE Access Special Section on ”Networks of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Wireless Communications, Applications, Control and Modelling”. He has been involved in several European and National research projects.

Muhammad Mahtab Alam (M’07, SM’19) received M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Aalborg University, Denmark, in 2007, and Ph.D. degree in signal processing and telecommunication from the University of Rennes1 France (INRIA Research Center) in 2013. He joined Swedish College of Engineering and Technology, Pakistan, in 2013 as assistant professor. He did his postdoc research from 2014-2016 at Qatar Mobility Innovation Center, Qatar. In 2016, he joined as European Research Area Chair and Associate Professor at Thomas Johann Seebeck Department of Electronics at Tallinn University of Technology, where later in 2018 he was elected as Professor. From 2019, he is the communication systems research group leader. His research focusses on the fields of wireless communications - connectivity, NB-IoT 5G/B5G services and applications, low-power wearable networks for SmartHealth. He has15+ years of combined academic and industrial multinational experiences while working in Denmark, Belgium, France, Qatar and Estonia. He has several leading roles as PI in multimillion Euros international projects funded by European Commission (H2020-ICT-2019-3, “951867”, NATO-SPS (G5482), Estonian Research Council (PRG424), Telia industrial grant. He is author and co-author of more than 80 research publications. He is actively supervising a number of PhD and postdoc researchers. He is also a contributor in two standardization bodies (ETSI SmartBAN, IEEE-GeeenICT-EECH), including “Rapporteur” of work item: DTR/SmartBAN-0014, “Applying SmartBAN MAC (TS 103 325) for various use cases”. He is associate editor of the IEEE Access journal.