The UK Government’s Critical National Infrastructure Policy for Emergency Services Communications Platforms: Vulnerabilities in the TETRA Architecture

Abstract

In this era of global communications individual communities and entire cities rely heavily on the public telecommunication platforms to support the emergency services workers to provide a professional service in extreme situations, such as natural disasters - floods, earthquakes and hurricanes etc; or terrorist / political attacks, such as London, New York and Madrid. Previous experiences have demonstrated that in such situations entire cities find their general communication platforms such as the Public Switched Telephone Networks and Cellular systems are overwhelmed with emergency communication traffic, as huge number of calls are made locally and internationally to the disaster area to determine if love ones are injured or safe. Until recently under these extreme conditions the emergency services would have to rely solely on the available telecommunications bandwidth and any contingency bandwidth that has been allocated for such situations. However the UK government has a part of its Critical National Infrastructure as deployed a TETRA based private mobile radio (PMR) system to separate critical emergency communication from the general communication platforms. This paper analyzes whether this new system is resilient or could the use of MANET’s be utilised to operate in extreme situations to provide a crucial short/mid-term communication platform.KeywordsCNITETRAMANETglobal Communicationsnatural disaster