Public Safety & Mission Critical LTE put to the test at SALUS Final Validation Event

Telecom professional Mika Aalto had a chance to participate at the SALUS final validation event, which was arranged on 14 and 15 June 2016 at the Emergency Services College in Kuopio, Finland. Aalto shares his personal experience below and in his Blog.

For those who are not familiair with SALUS, SALUS is a EU funded project studying and developing demo systems illustrating next generation PPDR communication tools. Key enablers for the anticipated new applications and communication methods are broadband radios i.e. LTE and WiFi. More about SALUS can be found here.

Situational Awareness

According to Aalto, many interesting working demos were shown during the event.

Video was widely used for situational awareness using a variety of video cameras such as; body cameras, cameras in drones and fixed surveillance cameras with remote controlled pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ). The live video was streamed over LTE.

Quite interesting learning was that videos sent from body cameras were not very useful for situational awareness due to shaky images and missing PTZ control. Maybe with some significantly improved image stabilization the body cameras could be used also for situational awareness. On the other hand, live video footage from a drone was giving excellent situational awareness information for the command and control center.

Location services

Location of emergency service teams is commonly available already today in command and control centers. This was one of the demonstrations during the event. Another interesting demonstration used and interesting command and control center application, based on smart board allowing command and control center officers to draw easily instructions to a map and send them quickly to first responders with smartphones. The officer could for example give graphical navigation guidance to the first responder team approaching the scene.

Furthermore indoor location services were demonstrated using WiFi radios providing beacon signals from known indoor locations, allowing the indoor positioning device to report the indoor location.

Also monitoring applications were demonstrated that were focused on the safety of first responders providing real time bio-vital signs such as heart rate directly to the control room.

Group calls between TETRA, TETRAPOL and LTE

The test of the use of complimentary radio technologies was part of the demonstration. During the demonstration, a WiFi mesh network provided extended coverage for LTE.

During the group call interworking demonstration, live TETRA, Tetrapol and LTE networks the dispatcher was able to dynamically connect TETRA, Tetrapol and PTT over LTE users to same call group, including  interworking between systems enabled group calls, amongst all technologies.