Executive Summary : | Timely response in case of a medical emergency can be life-saving. In many such cases that are attended by ambulance staff, the critical decision required to be effective needs expert input. The necessary communication required to enable an informed decision may put a very high demand on the communication channel, something that is not available in today’s ambulances. Such information may include a high-definition video, real-time vitals, etc. Multi-access technology can be used to address this problem. In such systems, a multitude of cellular modems is used to send the data (with or without added redundancy) to improve the overall end-to-end delay jitter performance. Being able to extract good uplink delay jitter performance from such an aggregation mechanism when the end-device (ambulance) is itself highly mobile (crossing through multiple cellular base stations) is challenging and requires an in-depth understanding of the way cellular systems schedule the uplink packet traffic. Once mapped to a communications problem where the objective is to transfer uplink high-definition video, the solution can be applied to many other use-cases/technology as well. Multi-access is itself an evolving technology and is seen as one of the key enablers for technologies to meet the IMT definition of 5G communications. Further, aggregation across different operators, when done in the core network, is in the domain of Mobile Edge Computing, which is another technology seeing rapid adoption. Being able to develop use-cases as well as technology within a single project is required in the Indian context. Extensions of this work are easily seen in other Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) systems/scenarios, thus the knowledge base and experience gained while executing this project will be used to directly help guide policy-making in India. Several products are now available in the new category of Mobile Bonding Routers (MBRs) used for best-effort systems, like providing high-speed internet access for a conference, or a live stream of moderate quality videos for live news services. These MBRs can be classified as “Portable” routers as against “Mobile” routers in the sense that in a typical deployment scenario, such an MBR will be static. The objective in this project is to optimize the MBR technology to an extent that it can be applied to a use-case with significant societal impact - something that commercial use-cases do not always require. Investigators have selected a Highly Connected Ambulance as the specific use-case, and other PPDR systems in general. The Connected Ambulance case requires a “Mobile” router and also provides highly reliable and delay-sensitive performance guarantees. Achieving such performance requires making use of the dynamically varying networks and bandwidth (channel quality) in an optimized manner. |