Impact of Mobile Broadband Data Access on Police Operations: An Exploratory Case Study of One Medium-Sized Municipal Police Department

As used in this study, “mobility” refers to “an inherent ability to move about,“ and “mobile computing” is a generic term that refers to the functional capabilities possible for end users as they complete tasks from various physical locations. “Broadband” refers to the relatively wide bandwidth characteristics of the wireless transmission medium and its corresponding ability to support multiple users and/or transport suitable quantities of data. “Mobile broadband” is used as a generic term to collectively refer to both terms in the context of the aggregate capabilities made possible through their use compared to other available mobile solutions and/or data. This study notes the lack of public-safety access to wireless broadband data, given resource limitations and a lack of independent evidence that would justify procurement of such technologies for police work. The current study’s deployment and assessment of this technology involved its use by the Brookline Police Department (BPD). Overall, the semi-structured interviews suggest that the wireless broadband technology was implemented with minimal difficulties and produced a number of perceived benefits for the BPD. The most direct benefit was the ease with which departmental technologies could be managed. Additional benefits were associated with increased access to timely information, increased information flow, and increased quality of reports. Structured interviews indicated that a few weeks of training sessions and ongoing informal bulletin and email disseminations were needed to overcome skepticism about the transition to wireless broadband. Most of the uniform personnel did not oppose the implementation nor did they perceive that the department was opposed to the transition. 39 tables, 3 figures, 93 references, and appended methodological details and supplementary data.National Institute of Justice (NIJ), US Department of Justice, Grant Number: 2010-IJ-CX-K02

The impact of interference on the performance of a multi-path metropolitan wireless mesh network

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have attracted much attention lately for providing efficiently wireless services with high quality of service (QoS). Metropolitan WMNs are a low-cost solution for providing broadband wireless internet access in large areas. One of the fundamental issues of wireless communications is interference. In WMNs interference can be caused by simultaneous transmissions at links internal to the mesh network or by external sources. In this work we perform extensive measurements in a multi-radio metropolitan WMN deployed in the city of Heraklion, Greece. The basic goal is to investigate the impact of interference on the performance of the multi-path WMN. Towards that goal, we perform measurements with FTP, video streaming and raw data traffic for two scenarios, one with an efficient channel assignment (CA) that accounts for interference and another with a random CA that results in high internal and external interference in the network. The results prove that interference creates severe performance degradation, with regards to high delay, high packet losses, low throughput and low signal-to-interference and noise ratio (SINR). As a result, the metropolitan WMN becomes unable to support multi-path flows and demanding applications with an acceptable QoS. © 2011 IEEE

A Rapid Emergency Deployment mobile communication node

In an Emergency and/or Crisis Situations (ECS) like earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, fires, terrorist attacks etc. the adequate operation of communication services is of extreme importance. History has shown that poor communication in such cases resulted in several casualties. In ECS fixed communication infrastructure might be unserviceable due to sustained damages. Evermore, the communication demand is highly increased in such cases resulting in poor quality of service as both civilians and authorities are trying to establish communications. In this paper, a Rapid Emergency Deployment mobile Communication (REDComm) node is presented. REDComm nodes include wireless communication technologies, to provide various telecommunication services in ECS and interoperability between them. It incorporates an 802.11a mesh cognitive radio technology that operates in the television broadcasting frequency bands to provide a backbone networking with increased range and flexibility. REDComm is constructed upon a trailer chassis able to minimize setup time, which is valuable in ECS. The presented platform is powered by a hybrid power source that combines thermal, solar and wind energy and eliminates the need for external power supply

Wireless Mesh Networks Based on MBPSO Algorithm to Improvement Throughput

Wireless Mesh Networks can be regarded as a type of communication technology in mesh topology in which wireless nodes interconnect with one another. Wireless Mesh Networks depending on the semi-static configuration in different paths among nodes such as PDR, E2E delay and throughput. This study summarized different types of previous heuristic algorithms in order to adapt with proper algorithm that could solve the issue. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to determine the proper methods, approaches or algorithms that should be adapted to improve the throughput. A Modified Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (MBPSO) approach was adapted to improvements the throughput. Finally, the finding shows that throughput increased by 5.79% from the previous study

Wireless Broadband for Municipal Police: Evaluating Clearance Times of Calls for Service

Though research has explored impacts of mobile computing and information technology on police operations, the literature lacks exploration of large-bandwidth data-sharing technologies that enhance the utility of mobile computing terminals. As part of a federally funded project, the present study employs a longitudinal pre- and postdesign utilizing 7 years of computer-aided dispatch data from a medium-sized municipal police department in the New England region. Pooled time series analyses are employed to examine the effect of wireless broadband implementation on clearance time of calls for service. Findings offer tentative support that clearance times for service calls decreased with the implementation of a wireless broadband network. Implementation did not appear to generate differential effects in areas that had experienced past challenges with cellular communication signals. Implications are provided, with an emphasis on the development of additional knowledge on technological evaluations

Traffic engineering multi-layer optimization for wireless mesh network transmission a campus network routing protocol transmission performance inhancement

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel UniversityThe wireless mesh network is a potential network for the future due to its excellent inherent characteristic for dynamic self-healing, self-configuration and self-organization. It also has the advantage of easy interoperability networking and the ability to form multi-linked ad-hoc networks. It has a decentralized topology, is cheap and highly scalable. Furthermore, its ease in deployment and easy maintenance are other inherent networking qualities. These aforementioned qualities of the wireless mesh network bring advantages to transmission capability of heterogeneous networks. However, transmissions in wireless mesh network create comparative performance based challenges such as congestion, load-balancing, scalability over increasing networks and coverage capacity. Consequently, these challenges and problems in the routing and switching of packets in the wireless mesh network routing protocols led to a proposal on the resolution of these failures with a combination algorithm and a management based security for the network and its transmitted packets. There are equally contentious services like reliability of the network and quality of service for real-time multimedia traffic flows with other challenges such as path computation and selection in the wireless mesh network. This thesis is therefore a cumulative proposal to the resolution of the outlined challenges and open research areas posed by using wireless mesh network routing protocol. It advances the resolution of these challenges in the mesh environment using a hybrid optimization – traffic engineering, to increase the effectiveness and the reliability of the network. It also proffers a cumulative resolution of the diverse contributions on wireless mesh network routing protocol and transmission. Adaptation and optimization are carried out on the wireless mesh network designed network using traffic engineering mechanism and technique. The research examines the patterns of mesh packet transmission and evaluates the challenges and failures in the mesh network packet transmission. It develops a solution based algorithm for resolutions and proposes the traffic engineering based solution.. These resultant performances and analysis are usually tested and compared over wireless mesh IEEE802.11n or other older proposed documented solution. This thesis used a carefully designed campus mesh network to show a comparative evaluation of an optimal performance of the mesh nodes and routers over a normal IEE802.11n based wireless domain network to show differentiation by optimization using the created algorithms. Furthermore, the indexes of performance being the metric are used to measure the utility and the reliability, including capacity and throughput at the destination during traffic engineered transmission. In addition, the security of these transmitted data and packets are optimized under a traffic engineered technique. Finally, this thesis offers an understanding to the security contribution using traffic engineering resolution to create a management algorithm for processing and computation of the wireless mesh networks security needs. The results of this thesis confirmed, completed and extended the existing predictions with real measurement

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio