Group Communication Over LTE : A Radio Access Perspective

Abstract: Long Term Evolution (LTE), which has its root on commercial mobile communications, recently becomes an influential solution to future public safety communications. To verify the feasibility of LTE for public safety, it is essential to investigate whether an LTE system optimized for one-to-one communications is capable of providing group communication, which is one of the most important service concepts in public safety. In general, a number of first responders for public safety need to form a group for communicating with each other or sharing the common data for collaboration on their mission. In this article, we analyze how the current LTE system can support group communication in a radio access aspect. Based on the requirements for group communication, we validate whether each LTE-enabled radio access method can efficiently support group communication. In addition, we propose a new multicast transmission scheme, termed index-coded Hybrid Automatic Retransmission reQuest (HARQ). By applying the index coding concept to HARQ operations, we show that the LTE system can provide group communication more sophisticatedly in terms of radio resource efficiency and scalability. We finally evaluate the performance of LTE-enabled group communication using several radio access methods and show how the proposed transmission scheme brings the performance enhancement via system level simulations.