QoS Provisioning in Public Safety Radio and Commercial Cellular Integrated Networks for First Responders and Critical Infrastructures

The complementary characteristics of public safety radio networks and commercial cellular networks make it attractive to integrate these two wireless access technologies to provide first responders with a wide variety of advanced services (e.g., multimedia). In this integrated system, service availability is a critical quality of service (QoS) requirement. This paper formulates the QoS provisioning problem and proposes an algorithm for solving the problem. The QoS constraint can be guaranteed in the proposed scheme by reserving some bandwidth in cellular networks for first responders. Numerical examples illustrate that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the service availability QoS for first responders.