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Public safety

Public safety communications research

SOCIAL SPOTLIGHT: PSCR HAPTICS CHALLENGE

A phone mounted on a metal arm shows a thermal image of several people standing in demo area.
Credit: S. Trunnell/Corner Alliance

Sensing through the smoke — in a dangerous environment with low visibility, firefighters can’t always rely on their eyes alone. That’s where haptic feedback comes in, a technology that leverages sensory cues (like a cellphone’s vibration) to communicate with its users. This could be the next frontier in situational awareness for first responders, so NIST is on an expedition to find out more.

Recently, NIST’s Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) Division put haptic solutions to the test as part of the final phase in our Haptic Interfaces for Public Safety Challenge. Our team used the thermal tick camera shown above to keep track of what was going on in the demo area, which was otherwise filled with smoke and not visible.

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News and Updates

Rendering of a building made by a 3D point cloud

Using Lasers to Save Lives

Scenario: you’re driving to your new job at a university campus and using your Global Positioning System (GPS)-enabled smartphone to tell you—and your car—how

Industry Impacts

Photo of NIST scientists with the PSCR Deployable LTE Cell-on-Wheels

First Responder Communications

First responders must be able to communicate during an emergency. Too often in critical situations, communications among public safety agencies are hampered by

Projects and Programs

Wildland firefighter

Public Safety Communications

To provide the public safety community with a better understanding of what to expect from new and emerging networking technologies, and accelerate the

Public Safety Communications Research

The primary objective of the Public Safety Communications Research program is to lead the development of wireless telecommunications and information technology

Publications

Bridging Analog LMR to LTE MCPTT Communications

Author(s)
Christopher J. Walton, Chic J. O'Dell
This paper explores a low-cost method to bridge analog public safety Land mobile radio (LMR) systems into a standards based Long Term Evolution (LTE) MCPTT

Study of MBSFN Area in Multicast Communication

Author(s)
Chen Shen, Chunmei Liu, Richard Rouil, Hyeong Ah-Choi
Multicast was introduced in Long-Term Evolution (LTE) in release 8 as the technology of the Evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services (eMBMS) and has been

Software

The Network Simulator, Version 3 (ns3)

The ns3 repository supports research on public safety communications and beyond. The Long Term Evolution (LTE) module has been extended to support device-to

PSCR Mission Critical Voice QPP SIM

QPP Sim is a simple discrete event simulator aimed at helping and accelerating the study of Quality of Service (QoS), Priority, and Pre-emption (QPP) mechanisms

Use Case Reference Model Database

The requirements of public safety are very multifaceted. As first responders incorporate more mobile technology into their mission strategies, they will have to

Tools and Instruments

LTE Coverage Tool

This experimental application was developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Public Safety Communications Research Division (PSCR)