Modeling and performance analysis of public safety wireless networks

Public safety wireless networks (PSWNs) play a vital role in operations of emergency agencies such as police and fire departments. In this thesis, we describe analysis and modeling of traffic data collected from the Emergency Communications for Southwestern British Columbia (E-Comm) PSWN. We analyze network and agency call traffic and find that lognormal distribution and exponential distribution are adequate for modeling call holding time and call interarrival time, respectively. We also describe a newly developed wide area radio network simulator, named WarnSim. We use WarnSim simulations to validate the proposed traffic model, evaluate the performance of the E-Comm network, and predict network performance in cases of traffic increase. We also provide recommendations on allocating E-Comm network resources to deal with the increased traffic volume.