ENABLING EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS INDOORS The Importance of High Reliability, Fault-Tolerant, In-Building Wireless Public Safety Commuications Systems 8618 COMMERCE COURT BURNABY BC, V5A 4N6 CANADA 40 CAVERSHAM ROAD READING, BERKSHIRE RG1 7EB UK

Reliability is Critical In the event of a crisis, public safety personnel require reliable emergency responder radio coverage. Being able to communicate with their public safety two-way radio systems in buildings is crucial for first responders to execute time-sensitive and mission-critical tasks to protect themselves, and the public. Response personnel cannot afford to experience disruptions in communications for any reason. Always being connected is the baseline requirement. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. For example, building materials, including newly tinted windows may weaken...

It has been 22 years since 9/11 and 6 years since the Route 91 calamities, and similar problems persist to this day, despite the availability of DAS solutions with technological advancements. Over the years, public safety communications have evolved from simple fire call boxes to analog land mobile radio (LMR) systems, to digital LMRs and trunked radio systems. Today the evolution continues with a shift to multimode broadband LTE systems, combining voice comms with data (including video, VoIP and IoT), providing higher situational awareness as well as enabling new technical appliances such as...

Redundancy Equals Reliability Although redundancy is not always a mandatory contractual requirement, it is a large factor to consider in eliminating single-point failures in mission critical wireless communications system to provide the required level of reliability. The simplest form of network redundancy is duplicating the system in its entirety, 1:1 redundancy. Full system redundancy is ideal and very effective, but in many situations, it may not be an option due to space and cost. In this article, an alternative and cost-effective method will be described - a fault-tolerant system. The Avari®...

The remote units by default process the signals from the primary host and ignore the signal coming from the secondary host. In the case of primary master unit failure, and/or primary fiber failure, the intelligent remote unit(s) will detect a loss of signal and automatically switch to utilize the signal from the secondary host and its optical link. When a remote unit fails, only coverage to a certain area is affected depending on how much coverage overlap is in the RF design. To further protect against remote unit failure, Avari offers redundant RF modules within the same remote unit. The automatic...

Intelligent Element Manager The Avari VL™ Element Manager (VL-EM™) is an intelligent controller that centralizes, streamlines, and automates the management and control of the Avari digital DAS for ERCES applications. It offers a user-friendly graphical interface for administrators and normal operators to perform their operations and maintenance tasks. The VL-EM™ continuously monitors the operating condition of the digital DAS network and reports alarms in real-time when faults are detected. It not only provides basic failover capabilities when headend equipment fails or fiber gets cut, but it...