| The ultimate goal of this project is to save lives and property during
emergencies caused by man-made or natural disasters and to facilitate and
improve the efficacy of routine, day-to-day public safety operations.
Specifically, NIST will work closely with industry, the first responder
and public safety user communities, government agencies in charge of
emergency response and public safety, and standard developing
organizations to develop modern, interoperable communications and
networking standards for emergency response and public safety. This
includes standards for not just voice communications, but also for a
number of other communications and networking capabilities particularly
suited to emergency response and public safety operations. These
capabilities include video streaming over wireless links, wireless data,
short messaging, wireless sensor networks, wireless access to the Internet
and other public communication networks (such as the Public Switched
Telephone Network (PSTN) and cellular telephone networks) and indoor
localization (namely, the capability to locate and track movements of
first responders and possibly victims/others based on Radio Frequency (RF)
or other types of signals received from them). An important aspect
of the project is to develop mechanisms to make the new standards
interoperable with a broad array of legacy public safety communications
equipment already in use today. |
- NIST Distributed Testbed for First Responders
(DTFR)
| DTFR is an example of what can be achieved when
several NIST laboratories with diverse technical concentrations
collaborate toward a common goal. It is essentially a
demonstration of how an integration of various technologies can
help first responders and public safety officers to be more
effective and efficient in their operations. It also is a
vehicle for experimenting with and assessing the performance of
new technologies and alternative solutions to various problems
encountered in emergency response and public safety operations.
During fiscal year 2003 (October 2002 -September 2003) NIST Building and Fire Research
Laboratory (BFRL), Information Technology
Laboratory (ITL), and Manufacturing
Engineering Laboratory (MEL) worked together to integrate a
wide range of technologies, such as communication and networking
technologies, sensors, indoor localization, fire evolution
prediction tools, building integrity analysis tools, decision
support systems, biometric identification, etc. The result
was a demonstration of a number of advanced capabilities through a
seamless integration of these technologies. DTFR was
successfully demonstrated to and well received by a group of about
two dozen fire/police chiefs from across the country in July 2003.
|
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Our
contribution to DTFR was in the areas of communications, networking,
and indoor localization. Specifically, we designed and prototyped
a wireless ad hoc network (also known as a mesh network) based on
commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware that provides users with
multimedia communication capability. Each handheld communication
device is an HP/Compaq iPAQ PDA, a PC tablet, or a PC laptop running on
Linux, equipped with an IEEE 802.11b WLAN card, and uploaded with
NIST-developed research prototype implementations of a number of
protocols and algorithms. These communication devices
automatically form a network as the first responders from various
jurisdictions converge on the scene of an emergency and are within radio
range of each other.
DTFR offers an array of advanced capabilities for first responders
and public safety officers. These capabilities include private
(one-to-one) / group (teleconferencing) / broadcast voice / data
communications, streaming video, sensor information communication, and
indoor 3D localization and tracking of responders / officers / civilians
/ assets. Furthermore, DTFR has interoperability with the
Internet, PSTN, and cellular telephone networks. For more on the
project, click here.
- Public Safety Communications
This subproject focuses on several areas including but not limited to
the following:
- Develop a guide on public safety communication
technologies
The goal here is to collect a wide range of useful
information about public safety communication technologies in
one volume. This volume needs to be accessible and a
fairly easy read for the public safety community. It
should help them learn about various wireless technologies that
can potentially be applied to public safety communications,
pilot public safety communication projects, new operational
capabilities possible with cutting edge wireless technology,
interoperability aspects of legacy and new public safety
wireless technology, etc. The primary focus of the guide
is on new as opposed to legacy public safety communication
technologies.
During review of the first draft of the report, it was decided to restructure it
for maximum benefit to the intended audience, so we entered a second round of editing. The
new report, now available, features the various technologies involved in the forward looking description
of public safety communications requirements described in the SAFECOM Statement
of Requirements (SoR).
In connection with the development of this guide to wireless
technologies, we have erected a web page on public
safety communications to make available current information on
related organizations, projects, and vendors.
- Facilitate development of broadband wireless standards
for emergency response and more generally public safety
The need for standardized public safety communication equipment is
fairly obvious. It is a well publicized fact that first
responders and public safety officers have had great difficulty
communicating with each other due to use of non-interoperable
communication equipment. In some cases fire fighters and police
officers in the same jurisdiction using communication equipment
acquired from the same vendor can not talk to each other. This
problem has been around for a number of years, but it surfaced in a
striking way with grave consequences during the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001 in the US. The short term solution to this
problem, which is used in perhaps a handful of areas in the country,
is through development of patches and interoperability
stations. However, these solutions are not scalable in the
sense that they can not support more than a handful of concurrent
communication sessions at a time.
The long term solution is to develop modern standards for public
safety communications and over time deploy interoperable equipment
built based on such standards. Of course, every standard has a
lifetime making it necessary to replace the equipment every decade or
two, but this is much better than today's environment where we have a
large number of different types of public safety communication gear
that mostly do not talk to each other. NIST, through its
unbiased and neutral test and measurement capabilities and performance
evaluation of various protocols, intends to work with various parties
having a vested interest in public safety communications to facilitate
development of modern standards.
- Develop interfaces and mechanisms to improve
interoperability of modern public safety communication technologies
with legacy technologies
The goal in this effort is to make modern public safety
communication gear interoperable with legacy equipment in use
today. There is, however, a limit to what can be done
here. For example, a modern first responder communication device
with image/video acquisition, display, and communication capability
can not send a video clip to an old push-to-talk radio. A
reasonbale expectation is to have interoperability for push-to-talk
voice communications.
- Design and prototype protocols and algorithms to
improve scalability of public safety communication based on a wireless
ad hoc network architecture
NIST DTFR has a number of neat multimedia communication
capabilities. Researchers at other institutions (in
universities, industry, and at least one government agency) have built
similar testbeds. However, the number of communication devices
used in such demonstration projects is typically 10-20. It is
not possible to conclude from such projects that the same network
architecture and protocols would work satisfactorily and provide
reliable communication when tens or hundreds of first responders and
public safety officers responding to an incident. For example,
about 700 first responders were involved in responding to the attack
on world trade center towers in NYC on 9/11. Will a mesh network
based on IEEE 802.11 technology work properly for such a large number
of users? Given the multihop nature of a mesh network (wireless
ad hoc network), how can we ensure that we do not end up with a
disconnected network? Will this multihop feature result in
unacceptable link delay levels for real-time communications, such as
voice communications? If IEEE 802.11 does not do an adequate job
of meeting these requirements, can we build a wireless ad hoc network
based on other existing radios or some to be developed in the future
that would solve these problems? These are all very interesting
questions begging for answers. Resolving these issues is also of
paramount importance to developing standards for public safety
communications based on a mesh network architecture. NIST plans
to carry out the R&D work and test and evaluations needed to
answer some of these questions.
- Indoor Localization
| In a July 2003 meeting at NIST about two dozen
fire/police chiefs from across the country identified the
capability to locate and track movements of first responders
inside a building and outdoors within one meter accuracy as the
single most important technological development enhancing
emergency response operations. While GPS does a good job of
providing such a capability outdoors (if one has line of sight
propagation paths to GPS satellites), the indoor localization
problem is for the most part still not adequately solved.
However, this is an intense area of research and development and
some partial solutions have already been found. The great
desire stated by first responder agencies at NIST and elsewhere
(for example, FDNY BAAs) to have such a capability has led to a
good deal of hype regarding this issue. |
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For example, a number of companies have claimed that they either have
or can develop the technology to locate first responders within 5
centimeter accuracy inside buildings, but it is not at all clear whether
they can deliver on this promise if the RF signals used for localization
have to propagate through several walls and ceilings. Another
concern is whether their solutions would require pre-existing
infrastructure (certain localization equipment) in buildings, which the
fire/police chiefs who visited NIST identified as a potential
show-stopper. It is not reasonable to assume that a given building
would have such infrastructure deployed in it. Even if a building
has such infrastructure, it may be destroyed due to fire or other
factors by the time the first responders arrive at the incident
site. Therefore, it is crucial to have a neutral, unbiased party
to test and evaluate indoor localization techniques and emerging
products to sort the facts from the hype. It is also essential to
initiate the development of standards for indoor localization.
Now is the ideal time for developing such standards, because none
exists today. This will maximize the chances of deployment of
standardized, interoperable localization equipment and products in the
future. The inexpensive, COTS-based indoor localization system
NIST developed within the framework of DTFR provides a localization
accuracy of 1-3 meters and requires existence of certain localization
equipment in a building prior to the emergency as well as calibration of
such equipment. This falls short of the expectations of the first
responder agencies, but it is a good start. NIST plans to work
with the industry, the first responder user community, and standard
developing organizations to develop indoor localization solutions that
meet the requirements stated by the user community, test and evaluate
such solutions, and facilitate development of standards for indoor
localization. |
