Tele-operating Rescue Robots: A comparative study of local 5G and remote satellite connectivity

We consider a public protection and disaster relief (PPDR) scenario where an unpredictable event disrupts common cellular connectivity. The origin of the event may either be natural, such as in cases of earthquake and flood, or anthropic, e.g., a terrorist attack. Hence, a group of public safety (PS) operators has to intervene in the target area to assess damages and assist the population. Grand Challenge 1 (CG1) aims at designing a networking solution to provide connectivity to the users (and devices) in the target area, thus aiding the search-and-rescue (SAR) process. Under this perspective, we consider scenarios where cellular network connectivity is either partially or totally unavailable because the traditional network infrastructure has been compromised. Although our design is finalized to support PS operations, the same solution could be applied to other use cases with similar characteristics of the GC1 scenario in terms of connectivity requirements and limitations (e.g., ultra-dense networks).