Cellular-enabled Wearables in Public Safety Networks: State of the Art and Performance Evaluation

With the aim of offering services and products that ensure the safety of people and properties, public safety organizations are responsible for providing the first responders, i.e., police officers, firefighters, and emergency medical service workers, with devices and communication systems that help them exchange time-sensitive and critical information. To address the mission-critical requirements and to target new broadband public safety applications, these organizations started migrating from traditional land mobile radio towards cellular communication systems with the consideration of a new set of deployed devices, such as wearables. In this paper, we first provide a state of the art overview of the features that are introduced by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and that can be used for public safety services. Second, we discuss the role of wearable devices, more precisely cellular-enabled wearables, in creating several new use cases as part of the concept of the Internet of Life Saving Things. Finally, we conduct a performance evaluation of a mission-critical service using cellular-enabled wearables, specifically a mission-critical push-to-talk (MCPTT) application using LTE Cat-M2-enabled smartwatches. In this evaluation, we examine the impact of different parameters related to the wearable device capabilities and the MCPTT call scenarios on the key performance indicator defined by 3GPP for this type of applications, which is the MCPTT access time.