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Showing posts from February, 2017

LTE for drone flight management and situational awareness

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A nice LTE based drone solution was shown successfully by Nokia in UAE Drones for Good competition in Dubai . It was so nice that Nokia won the Drones for Good Award in the international category. Public safety organizations can use LTE networks - also deployable LTE networks - for new applications and solutions such as unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with video cameras. LTE coverage significantly improves the drone flight control capabilities compared to traditional remote control radios. And at the same time LTE provides broadband capacity for multiple live video streams from drones. It is coming reality that emergency services can use LTE broadband and drones for improved efficiency in firefighting, search & rescue and many other public safety missions. It is important to note that this is possible already now - even before any 3GPP Release 14 mission critical video and robot control features.

Prioritization in commercial network

The market signals from various countries indicate a global trend to start public safety LTE (PS LTE) services together with commercial operators. The benefits are quite obvious i.e. commercial LTE coverage is already widely deployed and PS LTE total cost is reduced when radio access is shared with commercial use. Additionally mobile operators have good spectrum assets. Operators have commonly 50 - 60 MHz FDD spectrum, which makes it quite easy to guarantee adequate capacity for future mission critical broadband services. Mobile operators dimension and design networks for typical need and not necessarily to extreme load such as mass events. So, regardless of available spectrum, commercial mobile networks can get highly loaded or even overloaded. Still in all conditions public safety users must get reliable service access and good quality services. There are various technologies for prioritization like discussed earlier here . You may now ask, what is the news. Well, operators are g