Flexible protocol reconfiguration for emergency communication systems

The necessity for services of emergency communication systems to be uninterrupted and reliable has brought forward strict requirements for express software upgrades of base stations. Based on reconfigurability technology, this paper presents a protocol reconfiguration scheme for emergency communication base stations. By introducing the concept of 'local safe state,' the proposed scheme could make the updating and replacement of the protocol software flexible and maintain interactions during the updating procedure to achieve seamless system upgrades. Further, taking TETRA protocol stack and VxWorks operating system as an example, specific processes and realization methods of reconfiguration are proposed in this paper, along with the measurements of the factors impacting on the system performance. Simulation results show that, compared with traditional technology, the method proposed significantly improves the system efficiency and does not interrupt system services.