RSS-based location awareness for public safety cognitive radio

Robust and fast detection of the victim location during emergency cases such as vast area floods and other natural disasters is an important part of public safety communications. Even though cognitive radio technology is commonly related to public safety communications from the aspect of interoperability; awareness, learning, and intelligence features of cognitive radios can be beneficial for victim and first responder location estimation. Location and environment based services of cognitive radio technology can be employed to detect and locate victims even for cases in which the original core wireless communications network is down. In this paper, a location awareness approach for public safety communications is proposed. Location sensing method proposed detects wireless signals with the aid of noise floor estimation procedure and calculates their strengths in a given frequency spectrum. Simulation results indicate that less than 5% detection error rates can be achieved even for very low signal power levels which are the common cases for most uplink cellular signals in extreme cases.