Public Safety Situation Aware Services over Cognitive Radio Networks

One of the challenging features of the TVWS for public safety operation is its variation across space and time. More specifically the available channels are not contiguous and vary from one location to another. In addition the white space available in a given location can vary with time if one or more of the TV band primary users start/stop operation. Public Safety Situation Aware services are a main concern when one strives to provide a standard overview of an incident. This standard overview aims at providing intervention information as refreshed as possible to facilitate Incident Commander/Unified Command (e.g. in the case of an European cooperative intervention that involves different Operations Center). Within this study, we propose to investigate how this service can be supported in a Cognitive Radio Network context by considering the unpredictable availability of spectrum resources. We present a Random Network Coding based technique and evaluate the performance assessment of this technique under Cognitive Radio Network assumptions. We show that even for a very restrictive radio resource access, Public Safety Situation Aware services can be fully supported without interfering with a existing primary user activity. Keywords-Common Operational Picture, Public Safety Network, Network Coding