Conference Background:

Summoning police, fire department, ambulance or other emergency services in case of emergency is one of the fundamental and most-valued functions of the telephone. As telephone functionality moves from circuit-switched telephony to Internet telephony, its users rightfully expect that this core functionality will continue to work at least as well as is has for the older technology. New devices and services are being made available which could be used to make a request for help which are not traditional telephones, and users are increasingly expecting them to be used to place emergency calls. However, many of the technical advantages of Internet multimedia require re-thinking of the traditional emergency calling architecture. This challenge also offers an opportunity to improve the operation of emergency calling technology, while potentially lowering its cost and complexity.

Existing emergency services rely exclusively on voice and conventional text telephony (known as TTY in the United States) media streams. However, more choices of media offer additional ways to communicate and evaluate the situation as well as to assist callers and call takers to handle emergency calls. For example, instant messaging, wideband speech codecs and video could improve the ability to communicate and evaluate the situation and to provide appropriate instruction prior to arrival of emergency crews. Future emergency services will allow the creation of sessions of any media type, negotiated between the caller and PSAP using existing SIP protocol mechanisms.

Goals:

The goals of this workshop are:

• To learn more about the ongoing and upcoming emergency related work
• To synchronize standardization efforts
• To provide and to receive feedback

The main goal is information sharing. New insights might help the participants to influence the work in their organization. We expect that the awareness of each others work will lead to a more robust and more security IP-based emergency service architecture.

Motivation:

Today many standardization activities take place with regard to various parts of the emergency service architecture. They are, however, not as coordinated as they could be. There is the danger that uncoordinated activities lead to solutions that either do not work in some circumstances or to solutions that lead to duplicate work due to lack of knowledge of work done by other SDOs.

Early July 2006, the 3GPP CT1 and the IETF ECRIT working group have organized a joint session on emergency calls. This meeting was organized by Hannu Hietalahti (3GPP TSG CT chairman), Hannes Tschofenig (IETF ECRIT) and Marc Linsner (IETF ECRIT) and turned out to be fruitful to accomplish a better understanding of each others architectural understanding.

A subsequent SDO emergency services coordination workshop took place in October 2006 indicated that there is interest to organize a follow-up workshop.

Scope & Agenda:

This workshop is restricted in scope to citizen-to-authority communication. The main topics for discussions will be:

• Emergency services requirements and architectures
• Unauthenticated network access
• Emergency service identification
• Mapping location information to a PSAP
• Location formats and mechanism to deliver location information to various entities
• Legal aspects of emergency services

Tuesday, 10th  - April 2007
8:30 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Status update on emergency services by various SDOs:

• IETF ECRIT
• IETF GEOPRIV
• IETF SIP
• IEEE 802.16e
• IEEE 802.11u
• IEEE 802.11k
• IEEE 802.11v
• IEEE 802.21
• IEEE 802.1ab
• TIA
• 3GPP2
• 3GPP
• Wimax
• DSL Forum
• CableLabs
• ETSI TISPAN
• ETSI TISPAN STF321
• ETSI EMTEL
• OGC
• NENA
• ATIS-ESIF
• OMA
• WiFi Forum/Alliance
• APCO Project 41
• ETSI Global Standards Coordination (GSC)

Wednesday, 11th  - April 2007
8:30 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Status update on emergency services by various SDOs, cont.

Panel Discussions:

• Emergency service architectures: Co-existence or Enemies?
• Unauthenticated network access : A deployable concept?
• Location Configuration Protocols: How many more do we need?
• Location formats: Possibility for Convergence?
• Challenges from the legal side: What will regulators demand?
  Input from regulators, like FCC, OFCOM, EU commission, Bundesnetzagentur, etc.
• Quality of Service & Emergency Services: Does it make sense?

Thursday, 12th - April 2007
8:30 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Panel Discussions, cont.

For more information, please feel free to e-mail aaron@e911institute.org or call us at 202.292.4603