Next Generation Mission-Critical Communications Capabilities for First Responders
Next-Gen MCPTT is a project led by Prof. K. K.
Ramakrishnan (University of California, Riverside) and Dr. Jiachen Chen (WINLAB, Rutgers
University), which aims at improving the mission-critical communications capabilities for first responders.
It participated in the
NIST PSCR Tech-to-protect Challenge.
Our project was awarded
overall #1 and
best in class (Contest 2) in the in-person contest at the New York competition in Nov. 2019.
We then received the "Superior"
award in the nationwide contest.
NIST PSCR awarded us a seed round award at the same time as the nationwide online contest in May 2020.
We were subsequently selected as one of
the top awardees for the progress round in Nov. 2020, based on the improvements to
our application in the last phase.
In this project, we try to address 4 issues with existing Mission-Critical Push-to-talk (MCPTT) systems:
The messages cannot be stored or played. When the receiver could not hear it clearly,
he/she has to ask the sender to repeat. This wastes not only the channel resource but also the precious
time
of the first responders.
When a first responder needs to focus on some work and come back to the communication later, he/she
cannot pause the messages and play them when he/she is ready to hear.
It is difficult to serialize speech, especially on the connection with long delay,
e.g.,
satellite. The first responders would end up wasting a lot of time waiting for the floor or just
overtalk each other.
Existing solutions lack support for intermittently-connected and infrastructure-less
environments.
Our application stores messages received from the platform and play them when
the user wants. This includes message replay.
We allow users to push and talk whenever they want to. The application will monitor the
availability of the channel and send the messages when it can acquire the floor.
We take advantage of cloud-based speech-to-text and text-to-speech
capabilities to accelerate communication.
We added store-and-forward and device-to-device (D2D) communication
capabilities to support for different scenarios, including
1) all the users are connected,
2) users have intermittent connectivity,
3) only some of the users in an area has connectivity, and
4) none of the users in an area has connectivity but they need to communicate among them.
Our application allows smooth transition among all these scenarios.
We also made other improvements like SMS (text messaging) capability, dynamic group management with
geo-location
support,
upgrade/downgrade calls & call prioritization, log in using biometric information, etc.
Please see our tech-demos for detailed explanation for each enhancement.
Introductory Video
This video was presented in Tech-to-protect online contest (May 1, 2020)
Video for D2D Extension
This video was presented in Tech-to-protect progress-round contest (November 2, 2020)