Heterogeneous Public Safety Network Architecture based on RAN slicing

Efficient communications are of paramount impor- tance to improve Public Safety (PS) operations allowing better coordination, higher situation awareness, lower response times and higher efficiency during emergency. For this reason the evolution of PS communication networks toward commercial broadband network is widely well accepted. However, PS network deployment has to face with several challenges such as the provision of sufficient capacity, coverage and resilience as well as deployment costs and radio resources efficient exploitation. As consequence there is the need of detecting architectural solutions able to address these challenges. In this paper, we propose a Heterogeneous Network communication architecture where both infrastructures and spectrum are shared between PS and commercial operators thus reducing deployment costs and times, and addressing the main challenges of PS communications. The shared Radio Access Network (RAN) is managed by means network slicing and resources virtualization. In particular, the proposed architecture is based on a three-tiers scheduler that allows to manage different network layers and different RAN slices. Numerical results obtained by means simulations show the efficiency and flexibility of the proposed architecture. In particular, a significant performance improvement, in terms of unsatisfied data rate requests, is achieved in comparison with benchmark methods for both resource partitioning between different RAN segments and virtual resource allocation.