Always on, full mobility offers life-saving potential to first responders

Seamless mobility represents the ultimate state of convenience for wireless users, but for public safety first responders such as police, fire and ambulance, it could mean the difference between life and death. In his presentation at March’s Ottawa Wireless Cluster event, Motorola Inc.’s Derek Prada gave a high-level view of his company’s seamless mobility solutions and its benefits to first responders. "There are many different service providers out there looking at how they can create a seamless environment whereby you can move from one 802.11 hotspot to another, to the public network, to a different service provider’s network, to a home office – all the way from point A to point B without being disconnected," said Prada, who’s responsible for federal territories across Canada within the government enterprise and mobility solutions. "The bottom line is these are the types of solutions that first responders need. Technology does now exist to help the user be able to experience that type of environment." Motorola, said Prada, has pioneered solutions to provide the seamless experience, both using mesh technology and the traditional 802.11 infrastructure. The benefit of the mesh technology is that with each node, or user, acting as a connection point, coverage and capacity increase with the number of users. This is contrast to traditional wireless networks that suffer bandwidth constraints as the number of users increase. "The bottom line is we’ve expanded the capability of the 802.11 beyond its existing confines to being to meet the mission-critical needs of public safety users," said Prada. Explaining the technology in terms of real life situations, Prada said a speeding police car could access various networks as it travels from one location to another, with access points of the mesh network being nodes on light posts or other first-responder vehicles. Once out of range of the access points, the car could switch to a public 3G type of network without disconnecting. He added that one of the early applications of mesh technology was on NASCAR racetracks, providing remote streaming video from the cars as they moved around the network, so speed and mobility don’t typically disrupt the user experience. Another mission-critical benefit of mesh is it creates a GPS-type location technology where users’ locations can be tracked. In terms of applications, Prada mentioned the ability for SWAT teams to use vehicles and suitcase-type applications to set up a mobile data perimeter monitored from a laptop. "With that deployment," he added, "the command and control centre would be able to see video from each of those assets in the field providing location information, as well as a view of what that person is seeing." What Prada referred to as one of the most highly valued applications was the ability to extend a mesh network insidea building during response to a fire. By having firefighters drop a puck-like access point on every floor as they ascend the stairs in a building connectivity is never lost, allowing responders and the control centre to communicate with each other to request assistance or order the evacuation of an unstable building. Functions such as this truly show the real-world lifesaving capabilities of advanced mesh technology. Prada said there are deployments of Motorola’s mesh technology throughout North America, Europe and Asia, as well as a number of lab tests taking place. "The value of mesh technology is beginning to become apparent to more an more different types of applications and different types of customers," he said. "Enterprise, public safety, first responder markets, basically all of our customers want the same thing: they want always-on, full mobility, security, access to enterprise and access to information."

Always on, full mobility offers life-saving potential to first responders

News | April 19, 2006

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