Modeling of a Public Safety Communication System for Emergency Response

This paper describes simulation work in modeling a city-wide trunked radio system and evaluating its performance under stress. Specifically, traffic models are developed to simulate both routine background traffic and the traffic load associated with an emergency scenario of a high-rise apartment fire. An analysis of a one-month radio data log provided insights on the traffic distribution among different talkgroups, as well as building individual traffic loading profiles for the talkgroups directly involved in the emergency response. The performance of the radio system is evaluated under different traffic loading intensity levels. Initial simulation results show that this emergency response communication system provides adequate capacity even under intense traffic loading. However, one area of concern is the build-up of waiting calls within some heavily loaded talkgroup, which results in long waiting time to access the channel.