Surveying pervasive public safety communication technologies in the context of terrorist attacks

Existing public safety networks (PSNs) are not designed to cope with disasters such as terrorist attacks, consequently leading to long delays and intolerable response times. First responders’ life threats when accessing the attacked zone are more severe in comparison to other disasters and the accuracy of basic information such as the number of terrorists, the number of trapped people, their locations and identity, etc., is vital to the reduction of the response time. Recent technologies for PSNs are designed to manage natural disaster scenarios; these are not best suited for situations like terrorist attacks because a proper communication infrastructure is required for operating most of the classical PSNs. This serious concern makes it highly desirable to develop reliable and adaptive pervasive public safety communication technologies to counter such a kind of emergency situation. Device-to-device (D2D) communication can be a vital paradigm to design PSNs that are fit for dealing with terrorist attacks thanks to long-term evolution (LTE)-sidelink, which could allow the devices that people carry with themselves in the attacked zone to communicate directly. To our best knowledge, this is the first survey paper on public safety communication in the context of terrorist attacks. We discuss PSN scenarios, architectures, 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) standards, and recent or ongoing related projects. We briefly describe a system architecture for disseminating the critical information, and we provide an extensive literature review of the technologies that could have a significant impact in public safety scenarios especially in terrorist attacks, such as beamforming and localization for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), LTE sidelink for both centralized (base-station assisted) and decentralized (without base-station) architectures, multi-hop D2D routing for PSN, and jamming and anti-jamming in mobile networks. Furthermore, we also cover the channel models available in the literature to evaluate the performance of D2D communication in different contexts. Finally, we discuss the open challenges when applying these technologies for PSN.