Toward moving public safety networks

Fourth generation LTE has been selected by U.S. federal and EU authorities to be the technology for public safety networks that would allow first responders to seamlessly communicate between agencies and across geographical locations in tactical and emergency scenarios. From Release 11 on, 3GPP has been developing and specifying dedicated nationwide public safety broadband networks that will be scalable, robust, and resilient, and can address the specific communication needs of emergency services. In this realm, the requirements and scenarios for isolated E-UTRAN with no or limited backhaul access to the core network are still in progress. In this article, we survey possible public safety use cases with the induced network topologies, discuss the current status of the 3GPP standards, and highlight future challenges. We further elaborate on the need to support mobile backhauling in moving-cell scenarios and describe two LTEbased solutions to enable dynamic meshing among the base stations.