Public-Safety LTE: Communication Services, Standardization Status, and Disaster-Resilient Architecture

The fifth-generation (5G) communication systems will enable enhanced mobile broadband, ultra-reliable lowlatency, and massive connectivity services. The broadband and low-latency services are indispensable to public-safety (PS) communication during natural or man-made disasters. The existing systems have limited capacity, and hence their evolution is desired. Recently, the third generation partnership project long term evolution (3GPP-LTE) has emerged as a promising candidate to enable broadband PS communications. In this article, we present six major PS-LTE enabling services and the current status of PS-LTE in 3GPP releases, and discuss the spectrum bands allocated for PS-LTE in major countries by international telecommunication union (ITU). Finally, we propose a disasterresilient three-layered architecture for PS-LTE (DR-PSLTE). This architecture consists of a software-defined network (SDN) layer to provide centralized control, an unmanned air vehicle (UAV) cloudlet layer to facilitate edge computing or to enable emergency communication link, and a radio access layer. The proposed architecture is flexible and combines the benefits of SDNs and edge computing to efficiently meet delay requirements of various PS-LTE services. Simulation results verified that with DR-PSLTE architecture, delay is reduced by 20% as compared with the conventional centralized computing architecture.