Integration between terrestrial and satellite networks: the PPDR-TC vision

• Main Authors: Grazia, C. A., Klapez, M., Patriciello, N., Casoni, M., Amditis, A., Sdongos, E., Gierszal, H., Kanakidis, D., Katsigiannis, C., Romanowski, K., Simplicio, P., Oliveira, A., Sonander, S., Jackson, J.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bandwidth; Broadband communication; Communities; Emergency networks; Europe; future PPDR systems; Mobile communication; Mobile computing; network architecture; SATCOM-LTE interoperability; Satellites; TETRA
• ISSN: 2160-4886
• DOI: 10.1109/WiMOB.2014.6962153

Wireless communication technologies are critical for public protection and disaster relief (PPDR) professionals during the emergency operations that follow natural or man-made disasters, scenarios in which commercial terrestrial networks often fail to provide the necessary support. The reason is threefold: they simply get disrupted by the disaster, they cannot sustain the sudden surge of network demand or they fail to deliver the necessary bandwidth and/or other QoS guarantees. In every PPDR operation reliable voice communications are critical, especially in the very early stages of the response; nevertheless, there is an increasing demand from the PPDR community for a wider range of data-centric services. While current technologies used for PPDR operations provide a rich set of voice-centric services, they are unable to sustain high-bandwidth data-oriented applications. As the PPDR-TC EU consortium, we propose a hybrid approach to tackle the question of determining the future architecture for Pan-European PPDR networks based on the integration of Terrestrial and Satellite technologies, presenting our first simulation results on the integration of LTE and Satellite Networks.