The challenge

Background and context

Public safety and defence communities have critical needs for resilient, interoperable, secure, and ubiquitous communication to support operations in complex and challenging environments, such as disaster affected areas, crises in densely populated communities, rough terrain, remote regions, and maritime environments. Communication systems are often the lifeline for both emergency responders and the crisis-affected population. Effective and reliable communication is essential in saving lives, reducing the severity of injuries, as well as minimizing property damage. The evolution of mobile broadband technology has considerably improved the performance of mobile connectivity and enabled users to access real-time multimedia information with high-speed data services. These capabilities can be utilized by public safety and defence to disseminate lifesaving information to affected population, improve operational effectiveness through situational awareness, and/or make informed decisions for time-critical missions, such as evacuation, search and rescues, resources allocation post disasters, etc.  

While resilient networks are vital during emergencies, many remote areas and underserved regions within Canada still lack cellular coverage. Even in urban areas, disasters (flooding, wildfire, earthquakes, etc.) could damage the land-based communication infrastructure including 4G and 5G systems, leaving affected communities and emergency responders with no access to communication. In addition, emergencies and disasters could create a high volume of calls, messages, or internet traffic to overload the land-based terrestrial networks and lead to significantly degraded performance including dropped calls, choppy audio, latency, and sometimes, complete loss of connectivity. Both inaccessible and compromised mobile communication hamper public safety and defence’s efforts in addressing critical situations.  

Given the criticality of enabling uninterrupted broadband communication for public safety and defence, DND/CAF and public safety communities are seeking technologies and innovations to complement the terrestrial access technology to provide resilient, interoperable, and seamless communication that land-based networks cannot address alone. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has developed the NTN standard to extend wireless connectivity beyond terrestrial boundaries. NTN refers to communication networks that operate above the Earth’s surface to provide extended coverage. NTN incorporates satellites in different constellations, including Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO), Highly Elliptical Orbit (HEO), and Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) including high-altitude platform systems (HAPS), and other spaceborne or airborne platforms.  

With NTN, especially, emerging satellite direct-to-device services, it is envisioned that the existing mobile networks could be enhanced to fill service gaps, provide ubiquitous connectivity, enable new use cases, and improve the overall network resilience. However, different Earth-orbiting satellites present different technical challenges for communications, such as inherent propagation delays, doppler shifts, signal attenuation, interference with TN, or seamless handover in LEO. This challenge aims to accelerate the technology advancements for NTN, as well as exploring the potential use cases to unleash values of TN and NTN interworking to support public safety and defence operations. 

Essential outcomes

We are seeking innovative solutions that leverage the integration of NTN and TN to significantly increase overall mobile coverage and deliver broadband communication capability to regions currently not covered by terrestrial networks.  

The proposed solutions must:  

• Enable operations in remote, unserved, underserved areas, and when terrestrial networks become unavailable or unreliable; and 
• Enable interoperable communications with international partners and agencies to support joint operations, for example, rescue operations in the Arctic with other nations. 

Desired outcomes

In addition to the essential outcomes, proposed solutions should also consider enabling communication capabilities that could be developed, leveraging the integration of NTN and TN, to support one or more of the following: 

• Reliable and uninterrupted communication to enable public safety authorities to disseminate real-time emergency information to widely standard mobile devices. 
• Location-based call routing for emergency calls, regardless of access technologies used by the next generation 9-1-1 caller. 
• Resilient and seamless communication to support autonomous operations (e.g., drone swarming, human-autonomy teaming) that enables public safety and defence communities to enhance effectiveness in accomplishing critical missions, such as search and rescue or wildfire fighting in unserved or underserved areas. 
• Resilient and seamless communication to expand Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications, for example, improving real-time monitoring of telemetry and wildfire sensors in remote and underserved regions.