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DeHiGate - Deployable High-Capacity Gateway for emergency services
The Deployable High Capacity Gateway has been developed in the Celtic DeHiGate project to give emergency services new and innovative communications capabilities in emergency operations. It adds a deployable wireless network capability to the emergency network infrastructures recently deployed in many European nations. Whereas these TETRA-based systems create a fixed, narrowband infrastructure covering mainly the populated areas of the country, the DeHiGate solution is a lightweight mobile solution that can be deployed in minutes in emergency situations. It extends the coverage of the network to remote areas and can use any available infrastructure to connect the emergency teams with their central command sites. Hence, high capacity data transfer and live images can be exchanged to improve the operations at the emergency sites, giving better situational awareness to the commanders. Overall project idea Since the fixed TETRA-based infrastructure has quite low capacity mainly used for voice but also some narrowband data, the main idea of the project was to develop a gateway that can connect the mobile users at an operations site with each other, and with a central command site over various existing infrastructures. Examples of these infrastructures are 3G and WIMAX networks, satellite communications, and TETRA networks. The gateway will automatically find the available networks and route the traffic over the network best suited, so voice communications can be routed over the TETRA network, whereas high capacity data traffic, such as live images or database queries, can be routed over a network with higher capacity.
The users will be connected with small handheld terminals using commercial WiFi-technology to a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) that can be extended far away from the gateway by a wireless backbone network. This network is made up of small lightweight backbone nodes that can be placed in emergency vehicles at or around the operations site, or placed on the ground, in a tree, a pole or on a nearby building. The backbone nodes are interconnected with a separate WLAN using ad-hoc networking technology and directive antennas. Deployable gateway The deployable gateway prototype developed in the project is based on available Linux routing software extended with auto-configuration features and a multi-topology routing capability that creates different routing topologies for the various applications and services. Two topologies were used, one narrowband for voice and position updates of the various users, and one broadband for the high capacity services. This way the high capacity traffic was not routed over the TETRA network but routed solely over high capacity links to the central command centres.
Network management The network management application utilise Geographical Information System services to visualise the positions of the units collected from all the teams and resources to create an improved situational awareness for the local and central operational commanders. It also assists in maximising the network performance and resource utilisation by tuning radio parameters and the network structure. Field trial The project ran a field demonstration at the emergency services training site in Kuopio, Finland, in April 2008. A number of key public safety and emergency service users were present at the demonstration. Conclusion The DeHiGate project developed and demonstrated for the users a network concept that, if deployed in real operations, will increase the effectiveness of the emergency services in the crucial moments at the emergency sites. This was done by deploying a highly mobile gateway solution increasing the network capacity; hence, utilising advanced services such as live image transfer and database retrieval directly during the operations. Further information is available on the DeHiGate web page at http://www.celtic-initiative.org/Projects/DEHIGATE Please send us your comments on this article. |
