Critical Communication Services Research Articles

IEEE Access Special Section Editorial: Mission Critical Public-Safety Communications: Architectures, Enabling Technologies, and Future Applications

Disaster management organizations such as fire brigades, rescue teams, and emergency medical service providers have a high priority demand to communicate with each other and with the victims by using mission-critical voice and data communications [item 1) in the Appendix]. In recent years, public safety agencies and organizations have started planning to evolve their existing land mobile radio system (LMRS) with long-term evolution (LTE)-based public safety solutions which provides broadband, ubiquitous, and mission-critical voice and data services. LTE provides high bandwidth and low latency services to the customers using internet protocol-based LTE network. Since mission critical communication services have different demands and priorities for dynamically varying situations for disaster-hit areas, the architecture and the communication technologies of the existing LTE networks need to be upgraded with a system that has the capability to respond efficiently and in a timely manner during critical situations.

ARMATURE: a Structurally Adaptive Connectivity Manager for Critical Communication Services Preservation

In this paper, we present ARMATURE, a peer-to-peer overlay that provides highly resilient communication service for critical infrastructure control. ARMATURE can encapsulate all control traffic, e.g. SCADA sessions, within secure and highly resilient transport tunnels. Herein, it does not rely on any particular ISP provisions and can use any available IP interface. Most importantly, the constructed overlay network is able to structurally reshape, i.e. to change its structural graph properties, to face different situations and to reunite otherwise conflicting service requirements. ARMATURE can be easily deployed in the current critical infrastructures to protect their monitoring and control communications.