Femtocells for Public Safety Communications

The increased adoption of rich multimedia solutions in public safety communications is enhancing information sharing for improved situational awareness as well as boosting operational efficiency. However, the aforementioned benefits also place increasingly stringent quality-of-service demands on the underlying network infrastructure. In this chapter, the authors review the added value of utilizing femtocells for various public safety communications scenarios. To that end, a detailed case study on the exploitation of femtocellular resources for emergency telemedicine applications is presented as an illustrative example. Simulations carried out for an Long Term Evolution (LTE) network environment demonstrate significant improvements in terms of achievable throughput for the emergency response personnel when access to subscriber-owned residential LTE Home eNode Bs available in the indoor emergency sites is allowed, compared to the conventional option of accessing only operator-owned macro eNode Bs.