Communication and service platform for public safety personnel

This paper describes a communication and service platform for public safety personnel. The platform demonstrates just in time provisioning of data and scalable communication services and operates in a heterogeneous network environment with high survivability. As an example use case the design is aimed at the ad-hoc facilitation of the communication between and co-ordination of firefighters in disaster areas. The principle network mechanism between the network nodes is multi-hop ad hoc routing with a gateway function to cellular networks. Jini is selected as the middleware technology to enable the service provisioning, service access and network handovers. The service applications are derived from interviews and discussions with firefighters.