Public safety communication over 3GPP LTE

Abstract: The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is ready to present a new
cellular network standard: Long Term Evolution (LTE). LTE improves
communication for public safety users like police, medical, and rescue
workers in cellular networks. This creates a need to examine whether LTE can
satisfy public safety users requirements.

This thesis has a focus on group communication with a voice service. Using
the LTE cellular network simulator we find the cell capacity and examine the
performance at the capacity limit. We show that LTE can serve large groups
for communication and by examining different voice activities we show there
is only a small effect on capacity.

With a study of optimization techniques we show that combining a low
codec bit-rate with two bundled speech frames per IP packet gives a
significant increase in capacity. By improving the scheduler algorithm by
increasing the priority to old packets in the sending queue, we increase the
capacity further. Based on the results from the evaluation we determine that
LTE can satisfy the public safety users requirements, making LTE an option
for public safety communication.