Public safety network

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Public safety agencies at various levels of government have joined together to share information and communicate when faced with public safety incidents. Interagency collaboration initiatives of this nature result in the creation of public safety networks. Public safety networks may originate at any level of government, and their user base may span a single or multiple geographies. [1] Such a network of public safety agencies, supported by an information and communications technology infrastructure, emerges from the individual and collaborative behaviors of their member agencies. [2]

Contents

This description focuses on public safety networks in the United States. Public safety networks have received more attention and priority as the country deals with increasing threats from terrorism and natural disasters.

Public safety networks are defined differently as seen from different perspectives. From an organizational systems perspective a public safety network is an information technology (IT) enabled collaborative, inter-organizational system. From a communications network perspective it is a wireless network used by emergency services. Both definitions are accepted within the public safety sector.

Organizational perspective

Public safety organizations are limited in their ability to communicate and share information with other agencies even though they have the technology in place to do so within their own boundaries. Public safety networks help agencies realize the value of joining together to design, develop and deploy information and communications technologies to support policing, criminal justice, public safety and homeland security.

From the organizational perspective a public safety network is an interagency collaboration focused on the development and use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to support the information sharing and functional interoperability needs of public safety organizations engaged in law enforcement, criminal justice, and emergency response. As such a public safety network is a specific form of the broad class of inter-organizational information sharing systems (IOS) supporting information sharing among police and other public safety agencies. [3]

As an IOS a public safety network has an inherent complexity due to the wide range of factors that compromise the network. The formation, structure and operation of public safety network can be affected by any number of factors including rational choices made by public safety officials, political priorities, institutional considerations and capabilities of enabling ICT. The number of potential factors lending themselves to the explanation and understanding of public safety network is considerable. [4] Organizational perspective on public safety networks have used frameworks from rational choice, institutional, and complexity theory to understand their formation and operations. [5]

Communications perspective

From the communications perspective a public safety network is a wireless communications network used by emergency services organizations, such as police, fire and emergency medical services, to prevent or respond to incidents that harm or endanger persons or property.

Many municipalities are turning to mobile computing and other networked applications to improve the efficiency of their workforce, including public safety personnel and first responders. [6] Consequently, public safety workers are increasingly being equipped with wireless laptops, handheld computers, and mobile video cameras to improve their efficiency, visibility, and ability to instantly collaborate with central command, coworkers and other agencies. Video surveillance cameras and unattended sensors are becoming important tools to extend the eyes and ears of public safety agencies. A pilot study along the US-Mexico border uses a wireless mesh network. [7]

The need to access and share this vital new flow of data and images is driving investments in a new kind of network: broadband wireless mesh networks using Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and 4.9 GHz public safety radio frequencies. These networks are metropolitan or regional in scope, can maintain connections with highly mobile workers, deliver large amounts of low-cost bandwidth with extremely high reliability, and support real-time video, voice and data.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wireless network</span> Computer network not fully connected by cables

A wireless network is a computer network that uses wireless data connections between network nodes. Wireless networking allows homes, telecommunications networks and business installations to avoid the costly process of introducing cables into a building, or as a connection between various equipment locations. Admin telecommunications networks are generally implemented and administered using radio communication. This implementation takes place at the physical level (layer) of the OSI model network structure.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Communications System</span>

The National Communications System (NCS) was an office within the United States Department of Homeland Security charged with enabling national security and emergency preparedness communications using the national telecommunications system. The NCS was disbanded by Executive Order 13618 on July 6, 2012.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wireless community network</span>

Wireless community networks or wireless community projects or simply community networks, are non-centralized, self-managed and collaborative networks organized in a grassroots fashion by communities, non-governmental organizations and cooperatives in order to provide a viable alternative to municipal wireless networks for consumers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wi-Fi</span> Wireless local area network

Wi-Fi is a family of wireless network protocols based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio waves. These are the most widely used computer networks in the world, used globally in home and small office networks to link devices together and to a wireless router to connect them to the Internet, and in wireless access points in public places like coffee shops, hotels, libraries, and airports to provide visitors with Internet connectivity for their mobile devices.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Base station</span> Type of radio station

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wireless mesh network</span> Radio nodes organized in a mesh topology

A wireless mesh network (WMN) is a communications network made up of radio nodes organized in a mesh topology. It can also be a form of wireless ad hoc network.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Service set (802.11 network)</span> Group of all devices on the same wireless network

In IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networking standards, a service set is a group of wireless network devices which share a service set identifier (SSID)—typically the natural language label that users see as a network name. A service set forms a logical network of nodes operating with shared link-layer networking parameters; they form one logical network segment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disaster response</span> Second phase of the disaster management cycle

Disaster response refers to the actions taken directly before, during or in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. The objective is to save lives, ensure health and safety and to meet the subsistence needs of the people affected. This includes warning/evacuation, search and rescue, providing immediate assistance, assessing damage, continuing assistance and the immediate restoration or construction of infrastructure. The aim of emergency response is to provide immediate assistance to maintain life, improve health and support the morale of the affected population. Such assistance may range from providing specific but limited aid, such as assisting refugees with transport, temporary shelter, and food to establishing semi-permanent settlements in camps and other locations. It also may involve initial repairs to damage or diversion to infrastructure.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer network</span> Network that allows computers to share resources and communicate with each other

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In a hierarchical telecommunications network, the backhaul portion of the network comprises the intermediate links between the core network, or backbone network, and the small subnetworks at the edge of the network.

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Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are created by applying the principles of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) – the spontaneous creation of a wireless network of mobile devices – to the domain of vehicles. VANETs were first mentioned and introduced in 2001 under "car-to-car ad-hoc mobile communication and networking" applications, where networks can be formed and information can be relayed among cars. It was shown that vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communications architectures will co-exist in VANETs to provide road safety, navigation, and other roadside services. VANETs are a key part of the intelligent transportation systems (ITS) framework. Sometimes, VANETs are referred as Intelligent Transportation Networks. They are understood as having evolved into a broader "Internet of vehicles". which itself is expected to ultimately evolve into an "Internet of autonomous vehicles".

A wireless ad hoc network (WANET) or mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a decentralized type of wireless network. The network is ad hoc because it does not rely on a pre-existing infrastructure, such as routers or wireless access points. Instead, each node participates in routing by forwarding data for other nodes. The determination of which nodes forward data is made dynamically on the basis of network connectivity and the routing algorithm in use.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">South African wireless community networks</span>

South African wireless community networks are wireless networks that allow members to talk, send messages, share files and play games independent of the commercial landline and mobile telephone networks. Most of them use WiFi technology and many are wireless mesh networks. A wireless community network may connect to the public switched telephone network and/or the Internet, but there are various restrictions on connectivity in South Africa. Wireless community networks are particularly useful in areas where commercial telecommunications services are unavailable or unaffordable.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Victor Bahl</span> American computer scientist

Victor Bahl is an Indian Technical Fellow and CTO of Azure for Operators at Microsoft. He started networking research at Microsoft. He is known for his research contributions to white space radio data networks, radio signal-strength based indoor positioning systems, multi-radio wireless systems, wireless network virtualization, edge computing, and for bringing wireless links into the datacenter. He is also known for his leadership of the mobile computing community as the co-founder of the ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data, and Computing (SIGMOBILE). He is the founder of international conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services Conference (MobiSys), and the founder of ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review, a quarterly scientific journal that publishes peer-reviewed technical papers, opinion columns, and news stories related to wireless communications and mobility. Bahl has received important awards; delivered dozens of keynotes and plenary talks at conferences and workshops; delivered over six dozen distinguished seminars at universities; written over hundred papers with more than 65,000 citations and awarded over 100 US and international patents. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, and American Association for the Advancement of Science.

References

  1. Williams, C., Fedorowicz, J. and Tomasino, A. Government Factors Associated with State-wide Interagency Collaboration Initiatives. Paper presented at the 11th Annual Conference on Digital Government (Puebla, Mexico, 2010) http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1809881&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=61521807&CFTOKEN=96344159
  2. Tomasino, Arthur, Public Safety Networks as a Type of Complex Adaptive System. Proceedings in the 2011 International Conference on Complex Systems, Boston, MA, June 26- July 1, 2011. http://necsi.edu/events/iccs2011/papers/77.pdf
  3. Fedorowicz, Jane, Steve Sawyer, Christine Williams, M. Lynne Markus, Michael Tyworth, Dax Jacobson, Sonia Gantman, Martin Dias, and Arthur Tomasino, Design Observations Regarding Public Safety Networks. 12th International Digital Government Research Conference (dg.o), Washington, D.C., June 12–15, 2011. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2037556.2037601
  4. Williams, Christine B., Jane Fedorowicz, Steve Sawyer, Martin Dias, Dax Jacobson, Michael Tyworth and Sonia Vilvovsky, The Formation of Inter-Organizational Information Sharing Networks in Public Safety: Cartographic Insights on Rational Choice and Institutional Explanations, Information Polity, Vol. 14, Nos. 1-2, 2009, pp. 13-29.
  5. The Public Safety Networks Study, http://www.publicsafetynetworksstudy.org/
  6. "Wireless Mesh Networks for Public Safety". belairnetworks.com. Retrieved 2008-02-27.
  7. "Mesh Network Bolsters Border Security". govtech.com. Archived from the original on 2008-03-31. Retrieved 2008-02-27.