Evaluation of Datacasting and Lte Integration for Public Safety and First Responder Applications

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate has sponsored a series of tests and data collection opportunities, designed and executed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL), of integrated public safety architectures lever-aging a pilot datacasting system developed by the vendor SpectraRep. Datacasting leverages licensed bandwidth to embed secure data (including video) within digital TV transmission to provide an efficient means of targeted one-to-many communications with first responders and public safety officers over a wide area. Because it makes use of Public Television's robust infrastructure, datacasting can reliably broadcast information during emergencies; however, because it is unidirectional, it is more effective as an element within a larger cellular based architecture. The objectives of these tests were to validate the ability of integrated architectures to provide a resilient data- driven communications capability to first responders.