Jason Johur, TCCA Board Director and Vice-Chair, Broadband Industry Group
For first responders and emergency services workers around the world, applications and services that can enhance their work and contribute to greater safety and better outcomes are welcomed. Video is one of the most promising and versatile technologies for improving operational efficiency and effectiveness. With the increasing use of bodycams and drones, video is now widely considered as a significant capability to improve safety, coordination, collaboration, and quality decision-making, particularly during high stakes, end-user operational scenarios.
However, to ensure the effective use of video, public safety agencies and operators need to consider how to successfully deploy the service to support mission-critical operations, especially where the scale of its usage is considered ‘massive’. This means situations where the amount of video could potentially saturate network resources, if not appropriately managed.
To address this, TCCA has formed a task force focused on massive mission critical video deployments, and specifically identifying the key considerations when planning its implementation and use. One of the first outputs of the task force is the white paper ‘Guidance for the successful usage of Massive Mission Critical Video’.
Within the paper, key use cases representing different categories of operations are documented, i.e. day-to-day (routine) operations, pre-planned events, and major incidents. When analysing these use cases, identifying video producers and consumers is fundamental to understanding the overall problem domain, and those identified include actors such as first responders, officers, dispatchers, operators, government agencies, and other stakeholders.
From the outset, in creating the white paper, an emphasis was placed on identifying the key questions and challenges posed by mass use of video. This involved, amongst other things, polling representatives from government agencies and the critical communications industry. The results of the poll showed that the most frequent key challenges related to:
(i) Being able to set priorities and maintain control over the video flows
(ii) Ensuring seamless communications across different systems
(iii) Avoiding network congestion due to excessive video traffic
It is clear from the paper that using video effectively requires some forward planning and appropriate design of the network platforms to be used, especially in cases involving massive use of video. Properly dimensioning the network in terms of topology, spectrum and capacity is obviously a pre-requisite, as are the prioritisation of resources such as Quality of Service, Priority and Pre-emption (QPP) mechanisms. To manage the video streams, both application and operational perspectives need to be considered: 3GPP Mission Critical Video standards should be implemented, as well as the utilisation of video applications that react to the availability of network resources in a dynamic way in order to provide contextual data to the control room.
The main conclusions from this analysis – assuming no prioritisation of video streams or quality had occurred, and taking the use cases and a particular model of a typical commercial mobile network operator (MNO) network as a basis – show that how the warning phase of an incident is likely to be supported depends on the criticality of the incidents. A single dedicated radio network offers enough capacity for minor incidents; for major incidents a single commercial network is sufficient, whereas a combination of a dedicated radio network and a commercial network is recommended for critical incidents in rural areas.
Critical incidents are often characterised by very high traffic levels, not only from first responders but also consumers using commercial networks, which if not managed could generate congestion impacting all. Implementing QPP including access and application priority mechanisms and optimising the radio network will serve to manage these high load situations. Most situations would benefit from implementing greater video compression techniques and prioritisation of video streams wherever possible.
A key outcome from this study was the identification of the principal challenges linked to the massive operational use of video, particularly in each identified scenario, incident phase and locality (urban, suburban and rural). All user organisations interviewed had concerns about video being very bandwidth-hungry and therefore considered video flow management – i.e. avoiding and handling congestion situations due to excessive video traffic – as an important aspect of their operations. The organisations identified the need to set priorities between video streams and maintain control of the priorities during operations. Interoperability and seamless communications across different systems and agencies must also be ensured.
Among the solutions to address these challenges is the implementation of an appropriate network capability with sufficient capacity. This can involve a dedicated radio network (or network layer), access to the Radio Access Network (RAN) of a commercial MNO, as well as being able to deploy additional and significant capacity and coverage on site through rapidly deployable networks. Access to spectrum, whether dedicated or shared, is therefore also key for video. This is true whether the wide area coverage is provided via dedicated or commercial network(s).
The white paper identifies several network and video application capabilities relevant for managing massive use of video, but it is essential that operations are also taken into perspective to maximise the benefit of using video, as well as adopting standards-compliant solutions.
Advances in intelligent video applications and network capabilities will improve the usability of video in mission critical situations over time. The overall objective is to ensure that first responders and public safety agencies (and by implication other critical communication sectors) can use video effectively and for operational benefit.
