Digital televison for homeland security: Broadband datacast for situational awareness and command coordination

Abstract

Digital television (DTV) provides a critical broadband broadcast resource for interoperable public safety and homeland security applications. Beyond the simplistic view of DTV as a resource for repurposed spectrum to public safety, existing DTV stations are providing megabits per second of encrypted data, including Internet Protocol (IP) video, geospatial visualization, data files, text messages, and any digital media. These datacasts, not available to the public, can be targeted to one or any number of selected receivers or groups of receivers in the broadcast area with no congestion effects, unlike cellular systems; that is, DTV ensures all subscribers receive the full bandwidth available. This paper is an introduction to DTV for both day-to-day applications as well as resilient emergency and post-disaster datacast for wide-area situational awareness and command coordination. The paper also emphasizes the development of a datacast concept of operations for public safety and homeland security.