SDO Emergency Services Coordination Workshop (ESW07)

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.

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 (see http://www.emergency-services-coordination.info/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

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.

Meeting Venue

Washington, DC, USA,

Library of Congress 101 Independence Avenue, SE
Jefferson Building - Members Room
http://www.loc.gov/jefftour/

Reception April 10, 2007 from 6pm - 10pm
Postal Museum Banquet Hall 2 Massachusetts Avenue, NE (Next to Union Station)
http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/

Meeting Date

3 day meeting on 10,11 and 12 April 2007 (8:30am-6:00pm, every day)

Accommodation

HOTEL RECOMMENDATIONS:

http://www.thedistrict.com/placestostay/hotels/us-dc-washington.html

Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill
400 New Jersey Avenue, NW,
Washington, D.C., USA 20001
Telephone: 202.737.1234
Fax: 202.737.5773

Residence Inn by Marriot
333 E Street SW
Washington, D.C. 20024
Telephone: 202.484.8280

Holiday Inn on the Hill
415 New Jersey Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20001
202-434-0125 - Mary Hopkins

Capital Suites
200 C Street, SE
Washington, DC 20003
(202) 543-6000

Hotel George
15 E Street, NW.
Washington, DC 20001
Telephone: 202.347.4200

Washington Court Hotel
525 New Jersey Avenue, NW
Washington DC 20001
Telephone: 202-628-2100
Fax: 202-879-7918

Phoenix Park
520 N Capitol St NW,
Washington, DC 20001
Telephone: 202-638-6900

Renaissance Mayflower
1127 Connecticut Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20003
Phone: 202.347.3000
Fax: 202.776.9182
Toll-Free: 1.800.228.7697

Courtyard Washington Northwest
1900 Connecticut Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20009
Phone: 202.332.9300
Fax: 202.328.7039

Capital Hilton
1001 16th St., NW
Washington, DC 20036
Telephone: 202.393.1000
Fax: 202.639.5784

Hotel Rouge
1315 16th St., NW
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202.232.8000
Fax: 202.667.9827
Res: 800.738.1202

Guest Quarters
E. Street and 5th Street NE
Washington, DC 20002
Res: 877.893.3233

Jurys Washington Hotel
1500 New Hampshire Avenue, NW
Washington DC, 20036
Telephone: 202.483.6000
Fax: 202.328.3265

Reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities are available upon request. Include a description of the accommodation you will need including as much detail as you can. Also include a way we can contact you if we need more information. Make your request via email to Jenny Hansen (jenny.hansen@dot.gov) as early as possible. Last minute requests will be accepted, but may not be possible to fill.

Meeting Organization

This meeting is again planned as a public workshop. Still, we require indication of attendance by registering at the EDAS system by 4th April 2007.

In order to structure the discussions the organizers require title, abstract and duration of the presentation to be available by 31st March 2007.

Final presentation slides and full papers have to be available by 7th April 2007.

The EDAS system will also be used for uploading abstracts and papers and for participant registration. The EDAS workshop webpage can be found at http://edas.info/5461. Papers will be published in the workshop proceedings and will be made available (if unlimited distribution is allowed) through the conference web page.

100 USD need to be collected as a registration fee.

Remote participation will again be possible.

Participating Organizations

Invitations will be send to contact persons of the following organizations and groups. The following list is tentative:

• IETF (GEOPRIV, ECRIT)
• DSL Forum
• IEEE
• ATIS-ESIF
• NENA
• ETSI EMTEL
• 3GPP
• 3GPP2
• ETSI TISPAN
• PacketCable^?
• FCC
• Open Mobile Alliance (OMA)
• TIA
• US Department of Transportation
• OFCOM
• OCG
• Bundesnetzagentur
• EU Commission
• Wimax Forum (only if they get some work done)
• WiFi^? Forum/Alliance
• APCO Project 41
• ETSI Global Standards Coordination (GSC)

Program Chairs

• Jenny Hansen
• Marc Linsner
• Stephen McCann^?
• Christian Militeau
• Atle Monrad
• Henning Schulzrinne
• Hannes Tschofenig
• Harry Worstell

If you have questions please direct them to Hannes.Tschofenig@siemens.com with a subject header of "SDO Emergency Services".

-- HannesTschofenig - 08 Mar 2007