Resource Allocation in Public Safety Broadband Networks With Rapid-Deployment Access Points

Abstract

A nationwide interoperable public safety broadband network is being planned by the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet) under the auspices of the United States government. The network will be based on the long term evolution (LTE) standards and use designated spectrum in the 700 MHz band. The public safety network has different objectives and traffic patterns than commercial wireless networks. In particular, the routine public safety traffic is relatively light, whereas when a major incident occurs, the traffic demand at the incident scene can be significantly heavier than that in a commercial network. Hence it is extremely costly to build the public safety network using conventional cellular network architecture based solely on an infrastructure of stationary base transceiver stations. A novel hybrid architecture is proposed in this paper, where stationary base stations are deployed sparsely to serve light routine traffic and rapid-deployment base stations are dispatched along with public safety personnel to incident scenes to support heavy traffic. Spectrum and power allocation for the public safety network is optimized with the objective of minimizing the maximum delay achieved by all user equipments. Simulation results show that the hybrid architecture with rapid-deployment base stations provides the needed capacity and quality of service at a much lower cost compared with the conventional architecture.