Abstract-Public Safety (PS) organizations bring value to society by creating a stable and secure environment. The services they provide include protection of people, environment and property and they address a large number of threats both natural and man-made, acts of terrorism, technological, radiological or environmental accidents. The capability to exchange information (e.g., voice or data) is essential to improve the coordination of PS officers during an emergency crisis and improve response efforts. Wireless communications are particularly important in field operations to support the mobility of first responders. Recent disasters have increased the focus and emphasized the importance of the need to enhance interoperability, capacity and broadband connectivity of the wireless networks used by PS organizations. This paper surveys the outstanding challenges in this area, the status of wireless communication technologies in this particular domain and the current regulatory, standardization and research activities to address the identified challenges, with a particular focus on the USA and Europe.

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Wireless communications technologies play an essential role to support the Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) operational needs. The current Private/Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) technologies used for PPDR communications offer a rich set of voice-centric services but have very limited data transmission capabilities, which are unable to handle the increasing PPDR community demand for a wider range of data-centric services. Though some efforts have been devoted to upgrade PMR technologies with better data transfer capabilities, the progression towards an enhanced mobile broadband PMR standardized solution still lags behind the achievements made in the commercial wireless industry, which recently culminated in Long- Term Evolution (LTE) technology. Because of this contrasting progress, the adoption of commercial mainstream LTE technology to satisfy the PPDR community's data communication needs is gaining momentum and offers significant opportunities to create and exploit the synergies between the commercial and PPDR domains, which have remained almost entirely separate to date. In this context, this paper first discusses the suitability of LTE and related technologies for mobile broadband PPDR service provisioning. Next, it presents the argument that the most plausible future scenarios to deliver the increasingly data-intensive applications demanded by the PPDR agencies are expected to rely on the use of both dedicated and commercial LTE-based mobile networks. From this basis, the paper proposes a system architecture solution for PPDR service provisioning that enables PPDR service access through dedicated and commercial networks in a secure and interoperable manner and ensures proper allocation of the networks' capacity to PPDR applications through the dynamic management of prioritization policies. In addition, the spectrumrelated issues that are central to the proposed PPDR service provisioning solution are addressed, and a solution based on the joint e- ploitation of dedicated and shared spectra is proposed.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

The control and protection of user data is a very important aspect in the design and deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT). The heterogeneity of IoT technologies, the large number of devices and systems, and the different types of users and roles create important challenges in this context. In particular, requirements of scalability, interoperability, trust and privacy are difficult to address even with the considerable amount of existing work both in the research and standardization community. In this paper we propose a Model-based Security Toolkit, which is integrated in a management framework for IoT devices, and supports specification and efficient evaluation of security policies to enable the protection of user data. Our framework is applied to a Smart City scenario in order to demonstrate its feasibility and performance.