Textile Multiantenna Technology and Relaying Architectures for Emergency Networks

Every year around 200 million people are affected by hazards of different nature. In most of these situations public protection and disaster relief personnel are usually the first responders to provide help. To provide differential relief coverage in these scenarios, novel communication and network functionalities are being demanded, relegating today’s narrowband private radio (PMR) emergency systems to the background. These are data-support, increased coverage, broadband communication, and high reliability which will be addressed by novel communication technologies such as Long Term Evolution (LTE), LTE Advanced-pro, and future 5G. In this work we tackle two key technological solutions for future emergency communication networks such as an architecture based on relay nodes and enhanced user equipment by means of multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) techniques.