TETRA-a platform for multimedia

Emergencies such as air or rail accidents or those brought about by severe weather make great demands on communications both within and between emergency services including the police, ambulance and fire services. Research has shown that inter-personal communications can be improved by providing support for a range of information technologies to be used alongside, or instead of, conventional speech communication. The TETRA European private mobile radio standard provides facilities for networked digital voice and data transmission and is a good candidate on which to build an infrastructure to support these types of applications. Efficient networking is dependent on new protocols which not only work for a wide range of media types but also take into account the data transfer requirements of each particular application. These applications, their associated protocols, and support services will be integrated into a quality-of-service (QoS) architecture (QoS-A) which will provide a framework for monitoring and controlling resources within the system. This paper describes some of the basic building blocks upon which some of these concepts will be tested