Читать книгу Shaping Future 6G Networks - Группа авторов - Страница 37

Communications are a primary enabler of critical PS operations. First responders need to be aware of their surroundings and of the activities of the other personnel in the field. Moreover, communications are essential to deliver information and orders throughout the chain of command, i.e. between emergency operators in the incident area and the command station that is often remote. While traditionally the technologies for PS communications have focused on voice, data services can significantly improve the experience and safety of first responders. Notably, enhanced monitoring capabilities could allow a real‐time 3D rendering of the incident scenario at the command station or in head‐mounted headsets for the first responders. This can be done through video, from body cameras, or from flying platforms and with additional sensors such as lidars, 3D cameras, and thermal cameras, among others. Moreover, health and position sensors on PS operators could continuously stream telemetry data to other first responders and to the command station. Finally, the communications will not only be human‐to‐human but also extend to machine‐type traffic, to networking among vehicles (e.g. ambulances, fire trucks), and to remotely controlled devices. Remote control operations are indeed fundamental in several PS scenarios, where robots (e.g. wheelbarrow robots) are used to remotely defuse bombs, inspect incident locations, and perform operations in conditions that would be dangerous for first responders (e.g. during chemical leaks).

Given the importance of the related scenarios and use cases, PS networking has thus been at the forefront of standardization and research efforts throughout different generations of cellular networks, with notable examples in the device‐to‐device communications and proximity services introduced in long term evolution (LTE) Release 12 [6] and the development of FirstNet using LTE technologies. Following this trend, 5G research has focused on how to improve the throughput of data services in emergency scenarios, relying on the new spectrum bands (i.e. mmWaves) and mobile communication platforms (i.e. vehicular communications and drones). As discussed in [1], however, it is not clear whether 5G technologies will be capable of delivering the improved quality of service (QoS) (e.g. the ultrahigh throughput) with the high reliability level and the ubiquitous coverage required to support PS services.

Therefore, there is a case for further developing promising 5G innovations and bringing them to full fruition in 6G networks, focusing on reliability and coverage, with possible improvements in throughput and latency. Notably, the integration of non‐terrestrial (e.g. with satellites, balloons, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and terrestrial networks in 6G will increase the coverage of the network, allowing connectivity of a staggering 10⁷ devices per square kilometer. PS communications will also benefit from the increased throughput, to provide teleportation‐like experience between the command station and the incident site. Moreover, orchestration and remote control of robots requires end‐to‐end ultralow latency, thus pushing the over‐the‐air latency requirement into the sub‐milliseconds region and placing tight constraints on the latency budget of the rest of the network. An important requirement of PS networking is related to the sustainability and autonomy of the infrastructure, which should strive to consume as little power as possible to improve battery life in off‐grid infrastructures and mobile devices. To this end, 6G is expected to increase the energy efficiency by a factor of 10 with respect to 5G, with improvements in both the device battery lifetime and the overall network consumption.