Q4Health: Mission critical communications over LTE and Future 5G technologies

Abstract

Mission critical communications have been traditionally provided with proprietary communication systems (like Tetra), offering a limited set of capabilities, and mainly targeting voice services. Nevertheless, the current explosion of mobile communications and the need for increased performance and availability especially in mission critical scenarios, require a broad type of services to be available for these platforms. In this sense the LTE technology is very promising, as it provides mechanisms to enforce QoS, has standardized many useful functions in public safety scenarios (like group communications, positioning services, etc.), while it is being evolved to match future 5G requirements. The Q4Health project aims to prepare for market and optimize the BlueEye system, a video service platform for first responders. In our approach we use two FIRE+ platforms for demonstrations: OpenAirInterface and PerformNetworks. Q4Health is driving the optimization of the system with the execution of a set of experiments focusing on a different aspect of the network (core network, radio access and user equipment) and aims to cover current LTE standards, but also future 5G enhancements. The projectsTM outcomes will be the optimization of the overall BlueEye system and the enrichment of the involved FIRE+ facilities with more services, functions and programmability.