WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS AND MOBILE COMPUTINGWirel. Commun. Mob. Comput. 2010; 10:1159–1161Published online in Wiley Online Library(wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/wcm.1040

Guest Editorial

Wireless technologies advances for emergency and ruralcommunications

Wireless communications for public safety, emer-

gency communications, and delivery of wideband

services to rural communities are topics of crucial

importance to the welfare of the society. Broadband

wireless digital subscriber loop (WDSL) technologies

offer complementary and possibly low cost solutions

to providing broadband connectivity services even to

low densely populated areas that otherwise would be

outside the loop. At the same time the availability of

broadband wireless technologies can be useful for

effective information dissemination in times of nat-

ural and man-made disasters thus providing a funda-

mental tool helping public safety agencies in

providing quick response and support to communities

needing urgent assistance and relief. The topic has

been largely investigated (e.g. see references [1–6]

and references therein) during the last two decades.

The quality of communications services offered

by the actual public safety systems is in general well

behind of that offered by commercial systems. At

the same time, due to costs of radio coverage and

trunking, the quality of services provided by existing

commercial mobile systems in low densely populated

areas, e.g. rural areas, is well below that offered

by operators in urban and sub-urban areas. Current

solutions for rural areas for example provide basic

telephone services and only are rarely suitable for

effective data access. Some rural areas that are close

to natural woods with dry climates are prone to fires

that could be disastrous. Reliable emergency commu-

nications systems should be adequately available with

access to the residents in order for emergency autho-

rities to be able to respond to such natural disasters, as

quickly as possible, if they occur.

The society obvious need for new and advanced

communications services for supporting public safety

operations has led to the evolution of current systems

towards a new generation of professional mobile

radio (PMR) and standard communication systems.

Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) technology has

gained wide acceptance (especially in Europe) and is

considered one of the mature technologies for PMR

and even for PAMR (Public Access Mobile Radio)

markets. TETRA has been conceived in accordance to

the requirements issued by public safety agencies such

as ambulance services, law enforcement, civil emer-

gency management/disaster recovery, fire services,

coast guard services, search, and rescue services,

government administrations and so forth. In recent

years it has been observed that integration between

mobile broadband technologies and TETRA can be

helpful for the achievement of the advanced services

envisioned for the next generation of Public Safety and

Disaster Recovery (PSDR) communication systems.

In fact, data rates required for advanced emergency

services provisioning plus the demand for enhanced

mobility improved ad hoc functionality, and interna-

tional interoperability reach far beyond the scope

of the current PSDR narrowband telecommunication

systems and call for mobile broadband enhancements.

A significant challenge faced by professionals con-

ducting public protection and disaster relief operations

is the problem of incompatible communications sys-

tems. The goal of the MESA project established

between the ETSI and the TIA (www. projectme-

sa.org) [7] was to develop advanced mobile broadband

technical specifications that could solve interoperabil-

ity issues among different communication technolo-

gies and to define enhanced functionalities of the

public safety communication (PSC) systems. One

task of this special issue is to address the integration

of current PMR systems with 3G and 4G technologies

for providing enhanced communication services in-

cluding real time access to (local) sensor networks

Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

By Ibrahim Habib and Franco Mazzenga, Guest Editors

(if any) as well as to databases for retrieving and

distributing audio, video, and geographical informa-

tion. This could be important during an emergency

operation where a large amount of contextual informa-

tion is generated and need to be distributed wirelessly

to personnel from different emergency agencies [8,9].

In parallel, on the commercial side for civilian

applications, access to broadband communication

services has become an established, global commod-

ity required by a large percentage of the population.

It is widely recognized in developed countries that

the setting up broadband wireless access networks is

helpful to solve the ‘‘digital divide’’ gap. Efforts to

bringing mass-market broadband services even to low

densely populated areas such as the rural ones follow

the initiative of the European Commission called

Bridging the broadband gap which is intended to

carry high-speed broadband internet to all Europeans

and in particular to EU’s less-developed areas. WDSL

systems, even supporting mobile and nomadic users,

that are based on the Worldwide Interoperability for

Microwave Access (WIMAX) and other technologies

such as the Rural WCDMA (which is an effective

solution to rapidly extend UMTS to rural areas) can

play a significant role in the broadband wireless

access market. Furthermore it should be observed

that rural broadband access is not limited to Europe

but it represents a common global challenge.

The R-WCDMA and WiMAX technologies seem

to be promising solutions for the provisioning of

broadband services to rural areas. They can easily

incorporate all the technical solutions to improve the

link budgets and, very importantly, allow the re-use

of already existing wireless terminals (at least for

R-WCDMA). In general, it is well known that net-

works for rural coverage could be constructed from

the integration of more than one communication

technologies such as satellite, terrestrial and high

altitude platforms (HAPs) (if any). In this case,

techniques for the intelligent use of the available

radio technologies could help reducing deployment

costs and improving spectrum usage. Alternatives

for broadband access could be based on structured

terrestrial networks adopting (possibly cheap) techni-

ques for enlarging the cell coverage area of a single

base station deployed for offering point-to-multipoint

(PMP) services. These solutions include relay stations

and/or distributed (sub)-networks organized in a mesh

or ad-hoc that are connected to the base station which,

in turn, provides access to the core network.

This special issue includes a number of interesting

papers covering different aspects of emergency and

rural communications systems. Some of the topics

discussed in this special issue include: hybrid network

architectures comprising satellite and HAPS for cov-

ering rural areas as well as for supporting emergency

situations; integration of heterogeneous communica-

tion networks; protocols for ad-hoc, mesh, and

VANET networks. The problems of information dis-

semination during emergency and localization are

also analyzed.

Finally, we would like to thank the authors who

presented their work, the reviewers for their meticu-

lous reviews, and the editor-in-chief and the editorial

staff of the Journal for their excellent efforts and

support producing this special issue.

Ibrahim Habib,City University of New York,

New York, NY, USA

Franco MazzengaDipartimento di Ingegneria Elettronica,

Universita di Roma Tor Vergata Viadel Politecnico 1, 00133, Roma, Italy

References

1. Miller LE, Haas ZJ. Public safety. IEEE Communication Ma-gazine 2006; 44(1): 28–29.

2. Doumi TL. Spectrum considerations for public safety in theUnited States. IEEE Communication Magazine 2006; 44(1):30–37.

3. Salkintzis AK. Evolving public safety communication systemsby integrating WLAN and TETRA networks. IEEE Commu-nication Magazine 2006; 44(1): 38–46.

4. Dulski A, Beijner H, Herbertsson H. Rural WCDMA—Aimingfor nationwide coverage with one network, one technology, andone service offering. Ericsson Review 2006; 2: 79–85.

5. Westerveld R, Prasad R. Rural communications in India usingfixed cellular radio systems. IEEE Communication Magazine1994; 32(10): 70–77.

6. Cacciamani ER Jr, Garner WB, Salamoff SB. The emergence ofsatellite systems for rural communications. Proceedings of theIEEE 1984; 72(11): 1520–1525.

7. Metcalf M. Project MESA Advanced Mobile Broadband Com-munications for Public Safety Applications. The 14th IEEE 2003International Symposium on Persona1, Indoor andMobile Radio Communication Proceedings.

8. Diniz VB, Borges MRS, Gomez JO, Canos JH. Knowledgemanagement support for collaborative emergency response.Proceedings of 9th International Conference on ComputerSupported Cooperative Work in Design 24–26 May 2005; 2:1188–1193.

9. Proximity Emergency Network for Common EuropeanCommunication (PenForCec) www.penforcec.eu

1160 GUEST EDITORIAL

Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput. 2010; 10:1159–1161

DOI: 10.1002/wcm

Guest Editors’ Biographies

Ibrahim Habib received the Ph.D.degree from the City University ofNew York, the M.Sc. degree from Poly-technic University of New York, USA,and the B.Sc. degree from Ain ShamsUniversity, Cairo, Egypt all in Electri-cal Engineering. In 1991 he joined theFaculty of the City University of NewYork where is now a Full Professor. His

research interests span different areas of traffic engineeringin IP, wireless, and optical networking. He has publishedmore than 100 papers and reports in those areas. From 1998till 2000 he was with AT&T Labs, and from 2000 till 2001with Telcordia Technologies, Applied Research Departmentworking on the architecture design of IP over optical net-works, optical control plane and Operations Support Sys-tems (OSS). He was a Guest Editor of the IEEE Journal onSelected Areas in Communications (JSAC), the IEEE Com-munications Magazine and was an Editor of the sameMagazine. He was chair of many technical sessions, sym-posia and conferences. He is listed in manyMarquis’s who iswho in the World and who is who in America editions.

Franco Mazzenga received the Dr. Ing.degree in electronics engineering cumlaude from the University of Rome TorVergata, Italy in 1993. From 1993 to1994 he was with Fondazione Ugo Bor-doni making research on the propaga-tion at millimeter waves. In 1997 heobtained the Ph.D. degree in telecom-munications from the University of

Rome Tor Vergata. From 1998 to 2000 he was a researcherin Consorzio di Ricerca in Telecomunicazioni (CoRiTel).From 2000 to 2006 he was a researcher in the ElectronicEngineering Department of the University of Rome TorVergata. Currently he is an associate professor of commu-nications in the same department. Since 2001 he is thetechnical director of the Consorzio Universita IndustriaLaboratori di Radiocomunicazioni (Radiolabs – http://www.radiolabs.it). He is the author and co-author of morethan 90 scientific papers that have been presented oncongresses or published on national and international jour-nals. He is co-author of a book on Radar systems (in Italian)and co-author of four patents on communication technolo-gies and applications. His research interests are on wirelessaccess systems and networks and related technologies,GNSS systems and complex network theory applied tocommunication systems.

GUEST EDITORIAL 1161

Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput. 2010; 10:1159–1161

DOI: 10.1002/wcm