Integrating TETRA with Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Terrestrial Trunked Radio(TETRA) is a narrow band digital cellular network for Private Mobile Radio (PMR) communications mainly designed for voice communications with limited packet data capability because of band-width limitations. This limited packet data capability of TETRA is used for the integration of the TETRA network with wireless mesh networks. The wireless mesh network used in this thesis work is part of the FIGO network. FIGO is a robust communication system mainly intended for public safety communications and it consists two main network parts. One of these parts is the wireless adhoc network which can be deployed on incident areas. The oher one is the infrastructure omponent (back office node) that is used to nterlink disconnected adhoc nodes and it can also offer access for controlling an incident in the adhoc network. The FIGO network uses different communication technologies to link the adhoc network with the back office node and the main aim of this thesis work is to integrate the TETRA network with the FIGO network so that the TETRA can be used as one of the links from the adhoc network to the back offie node of the FIGO network. The main problem of the TETRA-FIGO integration is that the wireless adhoc network generates a lot of control signals that can easily overload the narrowband packet data channel of the of the TETRA network. In addition to the control overheads, the excessive headers also contribute a lot of overheads to the narrowband TETRA channel. Two architectures are proposed in thesis report to integrate TETRA with the FIGO network and the performance of these two new proposed architectures is analyzed and compared with the existing FIGO network protocols in terms of control traffic and header overheads.