A Primer On Public Safety Communication in the Context of Terror Attacks: The NATO SPS "COUNTER-TERROR" Project

Terrorism is emerging as one of the most serious threats worldwide. Terrorist attacks are becoming more coordinated, sophisticated and hence more devastating. One of the important reasons for higher casualities is the “sluggish response time”. In some of the recent attacks, police and law enforcement agencies even after many hours were unable to have some of the basic information such as how many people are inside the attacked premises, the number of seriously injured persons, the number of terrorists, what their location is and so on. So, one of the most important questions is “How to provide the fundamental information to public safety agencies as quickly as possible to reduce the response time following terrorist attacks”? The NATO – Science for Peace (SPS) “COUNTER-TERROR” G5482 project (2019–2021) presented in this paper investigates and proposed innovative ideas and solutionsto address this question from an information and communication technology viewpoint, including the establishment of secure D2D communication networks to quickly gather information and the use of UAVs to discover and localize weak signals. It is envisioned that “connecting” the on-scene available (OS-A) heterogeneous devices (through multi-hop device-to-device (D2D) communication) to the nearest mobile deployed command center in an efficient way cannot only rapidly disseminate fundamental information but also aid in significantly reducing the response times and, consequently, many lives and infrastructure. The objectives of this project are to design and evaluate efficient heterogeneous resource management by adaptive power control, throughput enhancement and interference management for device-to-device (D2D) communication. The originality is to exploit machine learning (ML) techniques to improve the existing state of the art. Further, the use of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for weak signal detection and devices accurate position evaluation is an important objective. The deployed setup with UAV assisted connectivity is one of the novel contributions of this project. In addition, context aware and reliable D2D multi-hop routing and network connections to ensure high end-to-end throughout and low end-to-end energy consumption and delay is another core objective. In order to enable the emergence of future pervasive communication systems enabling life-critical, public safety and preparedness, D2D communication can be realized both in licensed (driven by cellular spectrum) and un-licensed spectrums (used by other wireless technologies e.g., WiFi Direct, long term evolution (LTE) Direct, Bluetooth). In the licensed spectrum, smart phones can connect through LTE-A and can create multi-hop communication by exploiting UAVs (i.e., relay nodes). Whereas, in the unlicensed spectrum, smartphones can connect through WiFi Direct, LTE Direct, or LTE-U. The fundamental aspect of this work is to connect the devices (i.e., establish and maintain reliable connections) in harsh environments and existing works have to be extended and tested so that they can deal with such conditions. So far, there have been only a few research projects specific to the context of terrorist attacks. To enable future pervasive public safety communication systems, this work will foster the vision to achieve beyond state-of-the-art ambitious, highly innovative and challenging research and development goals. For the given context, in particular, connecting the OS-A devices in an efficient way to optimize their heterogeneous resources and improve reliability is key factor to the innovation of the proposed system. By implementing the proposed D2D-based solution, the average response time shall be reduced by an average of 8 to 10 times. The direct positive consequences are that more lives will be saved, the number and severity of injuries will be reduced, and damages to infrastructure will be decreased.