A method of emergency data transmission over a communications network, the network including a user equipment and a base station with an emergency data handling module, the method comprising: the user equipment wirelessly transmitting an emergency indicator to the base station； the emergency data handling module of the base station recognizing an emergency by associating the emergency indicator and related emergency data with an emergency event； the user equipment transmitting the related emergency data wirelessly to the base station with emergency priority based on the emergency event； the base station transmitting the emergency indicator and the related emergency data to a server. The emergency indicator may be transmitted as an uplink transmission request. The emergency data may also be transmitted with emergency priority from the base station to the server. The emergency data handling module may instruct one or more radio bearers for the emergency data with emergency quality label or emergency scheduling label. Suspension of lower priority traffic in the network may also take place to allow transmission of emergency priority traffic to maintain acceptable quality and/or delay levels. The emergency data may be transmitted to the user equipment from one or more sensor units, wherein the user equipment acts as a data collector in a local sensing network such as a body area network (BAN). The sensing units may be a medical device to monitor patient health or other sensor device such as a flood/environment/nuclear radiation/temperature etc. monitor. Follow-up measurements may also take place with an associated high priority allocated. The base station may provide a femtocell in a remote sensing environment to act as a home NodeB. The base station may further function as a gateway for direct access to a supporting server via the internet.
