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Wireless technology’s increasing role in public safety

The wireless transmission of data is becoming more of a norm in all areas of public, business and consumer life, and the same can be said of the security industry. In the area of public safety, for example, wireless technology is playing an increasingly important role and is now seen as a realistic option for a wide variety of projects, such as street surveillance, building management, access control and others.

Andy Robb, chief technology officer, Duxbury Networking.

Traditionally, public safety applications have relied on voice transmissions for incident reporting and response. As technology has evolved, so the communication infrastructures have changed. Today, wireless end-device technologies are enabling high-definition (HD) video surveillance systems to be employed for active crime prevention and incident management.

Why wireless? Until recently, analogue surveillance systems were ubiquitous. Relying extensively on coaxial cable infrastructures, the complexity of installing and maintaining these wireline solutions became untenable in the face of increasing demands for more – often enlarged – public safety video surveillance networks.

Exponential increase

Against this backdrop, demands for more effective public safety and security systems have been increasing exponentially from South African farmers, home and business owners and others at risk, fuelled by the country’s rising levels of crime.

Fortunately, wireless technology has advanced to the point where it can out-perform wireline alternatives in most applications, greatly enhancing deployment flexibility while reducing implementation costs.

For a growing number of public safety officials, fixed and mobile wireless networks are becoming the only options when it comes to the deployment of reliable, affordable surveillance networks capable of securing challenging environments. With readily available low cost HD surveillance cameras and high performance wireless backhaul systems now on the market, these officials can now place their cameras in the heart of known crime hot-spots and danger areas.

A high performance wireless public safety architecture requires the flexibility and scalability that can now be provided by end-to-end convergence of the communication infrastructure. Convergence of the entire system onto one common platform with mobile video sharing allows any number of security departments or groups with similar systems to communicate and collaborate, eventually forming a macro system.

Flexible and interoperable

Such an all-IP backbone, while fundamentally interoperable, flexible and scalable, is able to accommodate multiple systems offering convergence of different services through infrastructures that previously accommodated only one service. This flexibility presents an incremental force multiplier to law enforcement.

In this light, IP and the end-to-end wireless solutions that now exist represent the keys needed to unlock a flood of additional information and situational awareness at an incident spot. Going beyond voice to include video, data and still images will help the first response team and cooperating public safety officials make better, more informed decisions.

Being able to readily access detailed images from modern HD cameras equipped with electronic image stabilisation and high optical zoom capabilities, streamed directly to computer monitors will assist them to timeously deploy appropriate resources.

Speedy deployment

With the growing deployment of HD IP surveillance equipment at the network edge has come the need to get data speedily to the network backbone. This has highlighted the need for high capacity and secure backhaul wireless links which can be commissioned and managed instantly. The latest high performance backhaul links are able to transport live, high-quality video from multiple surveillance cameras to a command centre with military-grade encryption.

These highly-scalable solutions allow instantaneous deployment of multiple surveillance cameras backhauled by a single radio. Point-to-point and point-to-multipoint products on offer now feature the combination of multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) and advanced orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) technologies to enable carrier-grade reliability, performance and quality for robust connectivity even in non-line-of-sight (NLoS) deployments.

Looking ahead, specialist public safety communications vendors, dealers and resellers can be expected to benefit from a broader market for their devices and technology. This will enable developers to provide open and standards-based applications for public safety use while overcoming the fragmentation of many current, often-proprietary systems.

Improving interoperability through the adoption of open standards will further boost the general acceptance of commercial wireless devices and promote secure, flexible backhaul solutions serving top-of-the-line public safety and video surveillance deployments.

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