Mission Critical Public-Safety Communications: Architectures, Enabling Technologies, and Future Applications

Submission Deadline: 31 July 2017

IEEE Access invites manuscript submissions in the area of Mission Critical Public-Safety Communications: Architectures, Enabling Technologies, and Future Applications.

Disaster management organizations such as fire brigades, rescue teams, and emergency medical service providers need to communicate with each other and with the victims by using mission-critical voice and data communication. In recent years, public safety agencies and organizations have started planning to evolve their existing land mobile radio system (LMRS) with long-term evolution (LTE)-based public safety solutions which provides broadband, ubiquitous, and mission-critical voice and data services. Third generation partnership project (3GPP) objective is to preserve the considerable strengths of LTE while also adding features needed for public safety. Moreover, 3GPP Release 13 has recently included the Mission-critical push-to-talk (MCPTT) functionality into LTE standard.

Moreover, 3GPP has identified the device-to-device (D2D) communications as the key driver in emergency situations. The main motivation factor of considering D2D communications for public protection and disaster relief (PPDR) and mission-critical situations is its capability of providing the emergency services by using network-assisted scenario or by acting as a relay to transmit information from one end to another end similar to the ad-hoc network. Core communication technologies and features which will support this network configuration include direct communication mode, MCPTT, full duplex voice system, group calls, talker identification, emergency alerting, and audio quality. The software defined radio (SDR) has the potential to support seamless interoperability by implementing multi-band radios and multi-service radios. Moreover, reinforcement learning schemes can dynamically adjust the network elements by considering quality of service (QoS) requirements of the public safety users. Thus, this will lay down an interdisciplinary research agenda that combines broadband wireless networks, unmanned air vehicles (UAV) communications, SDR, reinforcement learning, cognitive and self-organizing communications, D2D discovery and communications, stochastic geometry, and energy and time efficient spectrum management schemes, into an integrated and synergistic framework.

The main objective of this Special Section in IEEE Access is to bring most recent advances in public safety architecture and communication technologies to the readership of the journal. This Special Section will provide the opportunity for research communities across the globe to share their ideas on these newly emerging fields of public safety communications.

Topics of interest include, but not limited to the following:

Public Safety Network Architecture

  • Architectures for public safety networks
  • Adaptive frames structure design for public safety networks
  • UAV-based network architecture for public safety networks
  • Moving cells deployment and backhaul design challenges for public safety networks
  • Reinforcement-learning-based communication architecture for public safety networks

Enabling Technologies and Future Applications for Public Safety Networks

  • Cognitive radio technology for public safety networks
  • Radio resource management for public safety networks
  • Power control schemes for public safety networks
  • Spectrum sharing and future spectrum requirements for public safety networks
  • Routing and MAC protocols for public safety networks
  • Cross layer protocols for public safety networks
  • Physical layer issues for public safety networks
  • Location detection technologies and protocols for public safety networks
  • Stochastic geometry models for public safety networks
  • 3D location detection protocols suitable for public safety networks
  • Disaster resilient location detection protocols for public safety networks
  • Robust location accuracy technology development to provide indoor localization using GPS
  • Channel measurements and modeling for public safety networks
  • Quality of service (QoS) and priority aware models for public safety networks
  • Public safety networks optimization by targeting low latency applications
  • Opportunistic offloading schemes for public safety networks
  • UAV applications for public safety networks
  • Reinforcement-learning applications in public safety networks
  • Device-to-device (D2D) Discovery & Communications for public safety communication
  • Multi-hop and relay-based communications for public safety communication
  • Robust models for multi-hop synchronization for public safety networks
  • Internet of things (IoT) applications in public safety communications
  • Intra-Band Full Duplex communications for public safety communication
  • Wireless power transfer for public safety communication
  • Interdisciplinary research for public safety networks
  • Software defined radio (SDR) testbeds and experiments for public safety networks

We also highly recommend the submission of multimedia with each article as it significantly increases the visibility, downloads, and citations of articles.

 

Associate Editor: Zeeshan Kaleem, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Pakistan

Guest Editors:

  1. Mubashir Husain Rehmani, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Pakistan
  2. Muhammad Ali Imran, University of Glasgow, UK
  3. Muhammad Zeeshan Shakir, University of the West of Scotland, UK
  4. Abbas Jamalipour, University of Sydney, Australia
  5. Ejaz Ahmed, National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA

 

Related IEEE Access Special Sections:

  1. Future Networks: Architectures, Protocols, and Applications
  2. Deployment and Management of Small Heterogeneous Cells for 5G
  3. Recent Advances in Full-Duplex Radios and Networks

 

IEEE Access Editor-in-Chief: Michael Pecht, Professor and Director, CALCE, University of Maryland

Paper submission: Contact Associate Editor and submit manuscript to:
http://ieee.atyponrex.com/journal/ieee-access

For inquiries regarding this Special Section, please contact: Bora M. Onat, Managing Editor, IEEE Access (Phone: (732) 562-6036, specialsections@ieee.org)