Optimization of ATSC Mobile Handheld Service Capacity

Mobile TV has become a reality offered on several mobile delivery systems. Among them is the Advanced Television System Committee (ATSC) system for mobile and handheld digital television services, known as ATSC Mobile DTV or ATSC M/H, which has moved from standardization to implementation. As the North American broadcast industry is preparing to provide Mobile DTV service to consumers, this work discusses important technical parameters that affect the TV service quality and capacity. Since additional error correction mechanisms were added to overcome mobile transmission problems, the available payload for M/H services is limited. This creates a need to efficiently use the available M/H bandwidth. The paper aims to optimize the Mobile DTV service capacity while maintaining an acceptable perceived quality. It presents tradeoffs between several factors affecting service capacity and signal robustness, which is prominent for designing Mobile TV broadcasting scenarios

LTE-Based Public Safety Networks: A Survey

Public safety networks (PSNs) are very crucial for public protection and disaster relief (PPDR). land mobile radio (LMR) technologies have been used extensively in the deployment of PSNs so far. LMR networks support sophisticated voice applications that can, to some extent, deal with the mission-critical nature of PPDR services. However, LMR networks lack technological advancements to support broadband (BB) applications. Due to this limitation, the attention is drawn to the long-term evolution (LTE) technology for public safety (PS) deployment as it has the potential to support various narrowband and BB applications and services. LTE-based PSNs should have strict requirements in terms of scalability, robustness, and resilience. In this survey, we will highlight the history of PSNs, including LMR and LTE-based PSNs, discuss the requirements that have to be inherited in PSNs, and examine the spectrum allocated for PS use. Moreover, we will study the architecture of LTE-based PSNs and provide deployment and migration solutions. Furthermore, voice delivery over LTE and LTE standardized solutions tailored to support PS services are discussed. Finally, rapid emergency deployment, spectrum management, priority management, and radio resource management schemes in LTE-based PSNs are discussed as well. At the end of the survey, we present PSNs simulation environment using network simulator and provide the results of multiple disaster scenarios

Enabling LTE emulation by integrating CORE emulator and LTE-EPC Network (LENA) Simulator

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a strong candidate for the next generation of Mission-Critical Networks (MCNs) for public safety and military use. However, extensive investigation on different operating scenarios has to be done before adopting LTE. Emulating LTE networks is the best solution to provide the needed insights to the regulators so that they can make informed decisions. In this paper, we integrate LTE-EPC Network simulator (LENA) module with the Common Open Research Emulator (CORE) in order to enable the emulation of large-scale LTE networks. The developed tool bridges the real and the simulated worlds by allowing us to connect real devices to simulated devices and passing traffic to the simulated world from the real world and vice versa. Using this tool, mission-critical scenarios could be investigated in a cost effective way

Control channel selection techniques in cognitive radio networks: A comparative performance analysis

Cognitive radio (CR) technology offers a promising solution to the spectrum scarcity problem via dynamic spectrum access (DSA). Due to the nature of cooperative cognitive radio networks (CRNs), where two distinct networks are active simultaneously, a significant amount of control messaging is required in order to coordinate channel access, schedule sensing, and establish and release connections. Efficient control plane messaging can be achieved by the selection of an appropriate control channel (CC). Major selection strategies of CCs are categorized as either dedicated or dynamic strategies. This paper studies the major potential techniques for selecting reliable CCs for coordination and information distribution in license-exempt (LE) bands. This involves determining the potential and limitations of each technique in terms of availability, complexity, and robustness. We consider real-life scenarios including an outdoor stadium and an indoor environment. Recommendations are given for different situations

Simulating large-scale networks for public safety: Parallel and distributed solutions in NS-3

Due to the critical importance of Public Safety Networks (PSNs), they must have regular on-site performance evaluation. Conducting tests on real systems are expensive in terms of money, efforts, resources, and time. On the other hand, simulation and emulation tools are very important in the design and modeling of engineering systems. They can play a significant role in reducing the high expenses of such periodic tests. NS-3 is a widely used network simulator with a lot of capabilities. However, simulating realistic and large-scale PSNs reveals many limitations in the performance of simulation and urges for methods to speedup the simulations. Despite the exerted efforts in creating distributed simulators, less work that targets wireless networks is done. In this paper, we survey the different methods to enhance the simulation performance including parallel and distributed solutions in the PSN context. We also propose a framework to evaluate and test PSNs in real-time manner. This paper opens the door for future work in achieving better simulations, in terms of reliability and consumed time, for PSNs' large-scale networks