CALL FOR PAPERS - IEEE ACCESS Special Issue on Mission Critical Public-Safety Communications: Architectures, Enabling Technologies, and Future Applications

http://ieeeaccess.ieee.org/special-sections/mission-critical-public-safety-communications-architectures-enabling-technologies-future-applications/

Submission Deadline: 30 June 2017

INTRODUCTION

Disaster management organizations such as fire brigades, rescue teams, and emergency medical service providers need to communicate with each other and with the victims by using mission-critical voice and data communication. In recent years, public safety agencies and organizations have started planning to evolve their existing land mobile radio system (LMRS) with long-term evolution (LTE)-based public safety solutions which provides broadband, ubiquitous, and mission-critical voice and data services. Third generation partnership project (3GPP) objective is to preserve the considerable strengths of LTE while also adding features needed for public safety. Moreover, 3GPP Release 13 has recently included the Mission-critical push-to-talk (MCPTT) functionality into LTE standard.
Moreover, 3GPP has identified the device-to-device (D2D) communications as the key driver in emergency situations. The main motivation factor of considering D2D communications for public protection and disaster relief (PPDR) and mission-critical situations is its capability of providing the emergency services by using network-assisted scenario or by acting as a relay to transmit information from one end to another end similar to the ad-hoc network. Core communication technologies and features which will support this network configuration include direct communication mode, MCPTT, full duplex voice system, group calls, talker identification, emergency alerting, and audio quality. The software defined radio (SDR) has the potential to support seamless interoperability by implementing multi-band radios and multi-service radios. Moreover, reinforcement learning schemes can dynamically adjust the network elements by considering quality of service (QoS) requirements of the public safety users. Thus, this will lay down an interdisciplinary research agenda that combines broadband wireless networks, unmanned air vehicles (UAV) communications, SDR, reinforcement learning, cognitive and self-organizing communications, D2D discovery and communications, stochastic geometry, and energy and time efficient spectrum management schemes, into an integrated and synergistic framework.

The main objective of this Special Section in IEEE Access is to bring most recent advances in public safety architecture and communication technologies to the readership of the journal. This Special Section will provide the opportunity for research communities across the globe to share their ideas on these newly emerging fields of public safety communications.

Topics of interest include, but not limited to the following:

Public Safety Network Architecture

Architectures for public safety networks
Adaptive frames structure design for public safety networks
UAV-based network architecture for public safety networks
Moving cells deployment and backhaul design challenges for public safety networks
Reinforcement-learning-based communication architecture for public safety networks

Enabling Technologies and Future Applications for Public Safety Networks

Cognitive radio technology for public safety networks
Radio resource management for public safety networks
Power control schemes for public safety networks
Spectrum sharing and future spectrum requirements for public safety networks
Routing and MAC protocols for public safety networks
Cross layer protocols for public safety networks
Physical layer issues for public safety networks
Location detection technologies and protocols for public safety networks
Stochastic geometry models for public safety networks
3D location detection protocols suitable for public safety networks
Disaster resilient location detection protocols for public safety networks
Robust location accuracy technology development to provide indoor localization using GPS
Channel measurements and modeling for public safety networks
Quality of service (QoS) and priority aware models for public safety networks
Public safety networks optimization by targeting low latency applications
Opportunistic offloading schemes for public safety networks
UAV applications for public safety networks
Reinforcement-learning applications in public safety networks
Device-to-device (D2D) Discovery & Communications for public safety communication
Multi-hop and relay-based communications for public safety communication
Robust models for multi-hop synchronization for public safety networks
Internet of things (IoT) applications in public safety communications
Intra-Band Full Duplex communications for public safety communication
Wireless power transfer for public safety communication
Interdisciplinary research for public safety networks
Software defined radio (SDR) testbeds and experiments for public safety networks
We also highly recommend the submission of multimedia with each article as it significantly increases the visibility, downloads, and citations of articles.

Associate Editor: Zeeshan Kaleem, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Pakistan

Guest Editors:
1. Mubashir Husain Rehmani, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Pakistan
2. Muhammad Ali Imran, University of Glasgow, UK
3. Muhammad Zeeshan Shakir, University of the West of Scotland, UK
4. Abbas Jamalipour, University of Sydney, Australia
5. Ejaz Ahmed, National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA

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Dr. Zeeshan Kaleem
Assistant Professor,
Electrical Engineering Department,
COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Pakistan.
http://ww3.comsats.edu.pk/faculty/FacultyDetails.aspx?Uid=19544