Grant Details

The PSIAP is one of several initiatives within the NIST Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) program. In FY 2022, NIST is seeking applications to accelerate research, development, production, and testing activities in six specific technology areas: 

• Mission Critical Voice: The PSIAP is seeking proposals for innovative R&D projects to accelerate the development, production, and testing of mission critical voice over LTE networks. PSCR's stakeholder engagement and evaluation activities, coupled with the technology landscape assessments and industry road maps, clearly support the need for R&D in two particular areas: 
  • Direct Mode Operations: Direct mode operations (DMO) allow first responders to communicate independent of existing network infrastructure.
  • Mission Critical Push-to-Talk: First responders use push-to-talk (PTT) technology as their standard communications for everyday operations.
• Location Based Services: Emergency responders have a compelling need to understand the physical environment in which they are working: Where are public safety personnel and equipment? What hazards and resources are present in the area? What entry and exit routes are available? PSCR refers to the collection of technologies and systems that gather, store, disseminate, and act on location and located information as Location Based Services (LBS).
  • Positioning: The most fundamental component of LBS for public safety is positioning: The ability to determine where something or someone is
  • Dissemination: the ability to get position information from the device(s) where it is calculated to the people who need to know it.
  • Data Security, Integration, and Interoperation: It is not enough to know locations of individual objects and people in some arbitrary coordinate system; it must be possible to integrate and derive meaningful information from a variety of data sources.
  • Mapping and Visualization: PSCR is interested in data collection (mapping) and data output (visualization and other UI modalities)
  • Affordable Localization Reference Environments: Interest in ways that a controlled environment can be affordably instrumented to create a precise localization reference grid that can then be used to test a variety of LBS technologies and solutions.
• Public Safety Analytics: Over the next decade, as public safety's use of mobile broadband technologies increases, first responders will gain unprecedented access to ‘big data' and data analytics that can be both collected from, and delivered to, mobile devices and sensors. While there is no doubt analytics will play an increasingly important role in the future public safety communications ecosystem, solutions are needed to address the volume, variety, velocity, veracity, validity, and volatility of data. In order to further the creation and consumption of potentially transformational operational analytics capabilities for first responders, the PSIAP seeks applications for R&D projects to address three specific need areas: 
  • Data Sets: Data sets collected from multiple sources and sensors that have been organized, integrated, and annotated, and that could be maintained for reuse by data scientists, analysts, and researchers are needed to develop meaningful public safety analytics techniques.
  • Analytics Tools and Frameworks: Tools are critically needed to make the development and tuning of analytic technologies more agile and less expensive so that it is easier for public safety to engage in the R&D process and share their analytic models and test methodologies across jurisdictions.
  • Data Analytics: Soliciting innovative exploratory, confirmatory, and qualitative data analytics for specific domains that are critically important to public safety.
• Public Safety Communications Demand Model: To effectively evaluate current and future communication technologies for first responders, the research community needs a well-founded modelling framework specific to the user community's needs. To be adequate, this framework should include more than simply the number of calls or volume of data.
• Research and Prototyping Platforms: Over the next decade, the public safety community will significantly increase their use of communications technologies to include: LTE mobile broadband, wireless back haul for cellular systems, inter working, and positioning/LBS. The PSIAP seeks applications for R&D projects to create a baseline of research and prototyping platforms, i.e. systems, software, tools, and models, that minimize the additional effort and risk required to conduct new investigations focused on these public safety communication technologies.
• Resilient Systems: The PSIAP seeks applications for R&D projects to evaluate or enhance the resilience of public safety mission critical systems in the face of connectivity challenges. This includes traditional research, evaluation prototypes, and enhancements to existing systems. The scenarios and research areas identified below are not exhaustive or authoritative: 
  • Decentralizing LTE/IMS Control and Data: This means that: (a) necessary services and functions are available within each island” in the event of network partition / disconnection, and appropriate local replicas are used when necessary, with as little disruption as possible; (b) necessary databases are replicated, allowing for local modification as operationally necessary, with appropriate consistency; (c) both 3GPP and IP/PDN (packet data network) traffic, including session initiation protocol (SIP)/VoLTE/IMS control and data, are routed (and broken out) locally within any island;” and (d) when the network is connected, but backhaul is limited (e.g., high latency, low throughput, or high cost/contention) user plane traffic and signaling traffic are kept local to the greatest extent possible.
  • Routing and Mobility Across Heterogeneous and Opportunistic Networks: Integration with LTE mobility and network status events, are desirable to maintain connectivity and efficient routing. Beyond routing, architectural questions of where and how IP-based networks and services (especially those not provided or managed by the NPSBN operator) are connected to the LTE network are applicable here
  • Data Management, Access, and Consistency: Data should be replicated, both on demand and by preprovisioning, to minimize load on overburdened radio access network (RAN) or backhaul links, and to ensure that critical data is available in disconnected situations. Client data requests should be satisfied from suitable replicas.
  • Service Replication and Access: When the central server(s) are unreachable, cloud services fail. It is therefore desirable to replicate services (as well as their associated data) to processing nodes which are close to, and reliably connected to, user devices. This invites questions of how services are replicated and hosted, what level of data consistency is maintained and how consistency is accomplished, how clients discover and select replicas, etc.
  • Future-Proofing: There is a need for an evolutionary path by which systems developed in the near future can subsequently be upgraded to take advantage of advanced capabilities as they become available.
  • Security, Identity, and Access Control: Many models of identity, permission, trust, and access management – including some being standardized for first responder mobile use – rely on access to remote servers holding policies, user data, and key material or shared secrets.

PSIAP Recipients will rapidly accelerate NIST objectives through innovative research and development (R&D) projects. Applicants may propose projects specific to one or multiple PSIAP technology areas and may propose cross-cutting projects that address one or more objectives within each or multiple technology areas. Applicants may also propose new ideas and objectives within any of the technology areas, but may not propose new technology areas.