Public safety wireless communication indoors is an essential service for both the public and the public safety agencies which rely on it to make life critical decisions. For the public this means the ability, at a minimum, to place an emergency call and be accurately located and for the fire, medical and law enforcement agencies the ability to communicate and inter-communicate during an emergency.
An in-building public safety communications system is complex since it must offer multi-protocol, multi-band communications for commercial cellular and in addition for public safety the system must offer high availability, high reliability, environmentally hard, encrypted communications with battery backup in the event of a power failure. Public safety communications must also be made available in areas not traditionally covered by commercial cellular communications such as stair wells, equipment rooms and underground locations.
This report discusses the evolution of public safety communications and codes and examines the architectures for indoor public safety networks and ownership of those networks.