[IMS Group] emergency situations

[alan lloyd]

Hi All, 

Most may be aware the bushfires here in Victoria have been horrendous and they are still burning in places with yet more warnings re higher temperatures and stronger winds in the coming days.

 

We have trees falling over, yellow grass and empty rivers too.

 

My Mum (over 80) in London with the snow there - and the parents of friends (who are over 80 too) that had to evacuate because of the fires – used the same line.. “We have never seen anything like it”… In the 80 years of their lives and where they live -  natures impact on their lives  this year has been at its worst.

I also realise Australia is not alone in this. Many countries have had disasters too which have cost lives and property. There seems to be more and more natural (unnatural) situations occurring around the world. So is there anyone who is developing NGN, IMS or web 2.0  telco 2.0 etc.. looking at next gen emergency services from a NGN perspective (BTW I am not keen on “2.0”  promotions)  

 

Our 911/000   traditional telephone emergency services has been with us for decades  but  unfortunately disasters such as our bushfires took out our mobile repeaters, exchanges, radio stations,  power lines, roads and blackened the sky (satellite coverage?).. so there is no easy answer.  

 

The iMS emergency services work I perceive provides focus on bearer QoS and PSAP/identity / SIP exchange..  The issues we are facing are much larger than that..

 

 NGN emergency systems … any thoughts?

 

Best wishes alan

[Tom Nolle Public]

The Department of Homeland Security in the US has a program that is designed to insure that critical personnel get communications priority in emergencies.  The system has worked well with standard telephony, but they were approaching a number of standards bodies a couple of years ago to determine how it might be handled for IP services.  I’m not aware that there was any resolution.

 

Best to your family, Alan!

 

Tom

 

---

[Matthew Roderick]

Hi All,
Here's my attempt at a guerilla network description for those who are
interested.

Guerilla Network as a term created around 2000/1 (or even before) that
what based on the theory that with the ever increasing number of small
battery operated wireless equip devices in the world (phones, games
consoles, laptops, cars, etc) it should be possible to create a ad-hoc
wireless network that used each device as a router/repeater to get
messages around the network. i.e. if person A wanted to transmit a
message to person B but B's device was out of Rx/Tx range of A's it
should be possible to bounce through any compatible devices that sat
in the middle.

A
|
|
X
|
Y
|
Z
|
|
B

Simple diagram, if devices could only transmit the equivalently of 5
carriage returns "A" could send the message to X & Y. X would forward
to Z and Z forward it onto B (the message destination). At the same
time Y could send directly to B.

So if your in an area that has a sufficient concentration of (capable)
devices then, in theory, messages sent will get through. This
principle was also expanded to include WAN capable devices, so if B
was connected to a WAN (i.e. the internet) device A could get messages
out to the wider world without actually being connected (in the
traditional sense).

As you can imagine there's a number of significant issues with this
approach which I'll not go into. But security, dynamic routing
maintenance, battery life, compatibility, etc, etc all play here. IP
related issues and solution include IP portability, tunnelling, number
of physical devices, etc.

Hope this makes sense!

Matt

2009/2/23 Matthew Roderick <m...@evolve.cx>:
> What ever happened to the Guerilla Network development thread that
> kicked off about 5-10 years ago, i.e. the ability for messages to be
> dynamically routed from device to device (with not fixed
> infrastructure) until it finds a working access point (cell site /
> hotspot / etc) with WAN connectivity? This could support the
> situations Alan describes!
>
> I always thought that this approach (even given it's problems) had
> some merit and I'm now surprised there's been very little (from what I
> can see on google) work been done on it in recent years.
>
> Anyone know what happened?
>
> Cheers
>
> Matt
>
> 2009/2/23 Tom Nolle Public <tno...@cimicorp.com>:

>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>
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[Gunnar Hellstrom]

Good and important thoughts alan,

I have an easier request on IMS emegency services.

It is that they shall be built on full Multimedia Telephony with three media in the calls: real time video, text and voice.

By that, you can show the emergency situation, you can describe details in text if the roar of fire is too loud to talk, and you can talk as usual when that is possible.

Furthermore, this combination also let people who cannot use the audio medium fully for voice, because of a disability, make emeregency calls using any combination of modes they master. Interpreters and other communication experts can be linked into the call through three-party conneections.

 

That is my vision of using IMS to solve one set of emergency service problems today.

 

I am sorry, it does not solve your problem with maintaining qos when base stations and cables are gone. 

 

Gunnar Hellstrom

---

From: imsgroup...@imsforum.org [mailto:imsgroup...@imsforum.org] On Behalf Of alan lloyd

Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2009 7:43 AM

To: imsg...@imsforum.org
Subject: [IMS Group] emergency situations

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[lucia]

this could be an opportunity for yet another type of provider: as the mobile device is on battery hence still working some satellite communication capability can be turned on for emergency when the tower is lost. not simple, expensive and prone to policy disagreements, it is, nevertheless, an alternative allowing to locate and even communicate with somebody on the edge.

Alan, sorry to hear what is happening on your side of the world! You are right such catastrophes arrive almost everywhere and communications regulators should look into a more global solution, including ways to support it.  
Lucia

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--
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mobile: +1.719.964.1446
skype: lgradina
http://www.lggsolutions.com

[colin...@kpn.com]

Matthew,

If you are interested take a look at the IETF P2PSIP WG. Ad-hoc/Mesh
networks are indeed discussed for a while now. But full-fledged
implementation is somewhere in the (foreseeable) future. Wrt to
emergency situations there are some very specific challenges:
resilience, availability, transparancy.

Resilience is required to ensure communication capabilities even when
devices deregister/register with the network because people move hectic
in and out of reach (the ad-hoc network must be able to adopt very
fast)of each other, besides circumstances may deteriorate conditions for
transmission. In addition ad-hoc networks require a certain number of
peers, in large spread situations such as bushfires in Australia this
threshold may not be reached.
Availability is expecially important because in many countries it is
required by law that emergency services can be reached at all times and
provide location information. In addition, communications between
governmental agencies (firefighters, police, army, etc) are often
classified and priviledged (= prioritized).
What I just called transparancy refers to the fact that emergeny
services would want to know who you are and where you are. This
information has to be trustworthy, so somehow this information needs to
be validated. Secondly, the different devices must be able to connect
easily with each other without (any) manual intervention (this is
especially true for emergency situations where people may panic and not
be able to act logically).

Colin

-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: imsgroup...@imsforum.org
[mailto:imsgroup...@imsforum.org] Namens Matthew Roderick
Verzonden: maandag 23 februari 2009 13:59
Aan: imsg...@imsforum.org
CC: tech...@imsforum.org
Onderwerp: Re: [IMS Group] emergency situations

Hope this makes sense!

Matt

>> fires - used the same line.. "We have never seen anything like it"...

>> In the 80 years of their lives and where they live - natures impact
>> on their lives this year has been at its worst.
>>
>> I also realise Australia is not alone in this. Many countries have
>> had disasters too which have cost lives and property. There seems to
>> be more and more natural (unnatural) situations occurring around the
>> world. So is there anyone who is developing NGN, IMS or web 2.0
>> telco 2.0 etc.. looking at next gen emergency services from a NGN
>> perspective (BTW I am not keen on "2.0" promotions)
>>
>>
>>
>> Our 911/000 traditional telephone emergency services has been with
us for
>> decades but unfortunately disasters such as our bushfires took out
>> our mobile repeaters, exchanges, radio stations, power lines, roads
>> and blackened the sky (satellite coverage?).. so there is no easy
answer.
>>
>>
>>
>> The iMS emergency services work I perceive provides focus on bearer
>> QoS and PSAP/identity / SIP exchange.. The issues we are facing are
>> much larger than that..
>>
>>
>>

>> NGN emergency systems ... any thoughts?

[Matthew Roderick]

Hi Alan,

thanks for bringing (at least) me back to subject, regarding you
question I think the guerrilla network (or mesh network as it's now
know) could play a part but with some modification. The deployment of
monitoring stations as you described, in a traditional manner (hub and
spoke) may not be practical in the geography but deploying a mesh
solution where every point can act as a router/repeater as well as a
monitor could work. If built in the right way (cheap, reliable and
self powered through solar or other) you could almost air drop
hundreds of the things across a large area (maybe I'm going to far
here), once inplace they can setup connections with their nodes in
range and create a monitoring grid of sorts.

Regarding the relationship with IMS/NGN I think these sorts of
solutions are key to exploiting and expanding the potential market for
a large geographical wireless networks. With voice & pure data revenue
declining, delivering service and applications that can exploit
existing and new investment have to be included.

Cheers

Matt

2009/2/24 alan lloyd <alan....@wwite.com>:
> Hi all, Matt, Gunnar, Lucia    -  and thanks for the feed back - First of
> all I realize this is an IMS group and this topic goes well beyond IMS - so
> on this occasion may I indulge a little.
>
>
>
> May I relay why these fires are so horrendous.
>
> Under the heat of the day, the resin from our gum trees forms a highly
> flammable vapour cloud within and across the bushland.  Strong winds caused
> by existing fires or weather patterns then drive the cloud,  lets say at 20
> - 50 MPH over towns and other areas of bush. Then suddenly the cloud
> ignites.  Statements –“ its like 10 * 747s just above your head”..  "The
> wind was on fire",  “The aluminium tray on my truck had melted and the
> molten metal had run down my drive”, put the scene into perspective.
>
> Winds then change direction - and the process gets repeated.
>
> Once we are through the initial and terrible losses, the follow on is we
> have burnt ash and carbon in our water catchment areas (carcinogenic) ,
> smoke tainted crops, a massive loss of wildlife and its habitat.
>
>
>
> I think from an operational perspective we need (for example) to drop/deploy
> multiple (fire and flood resistant ) wireless - telemetry capable , relay
> machinery.
>
> In our case these would contain location, motion, heat, smoke, wind and
> noise sensing / vision systems that can relay their intelligence back to
> base and at the same time collectively form a broadcast system and receive
> SOS messages.
>
>
>
> And from a “UE” perspective –please remember that we have an aging
> population which generally retire to the bush, small farms and towns. Some
> people are partially sighted, have partial hearing and might have
> disabilities such as rheumatoid arthritis. I am sure they find telephone
>  keypads unfriendly to say the least.  I am sure we have all noticed that
> older people look for their glasses before they pick up their phones.
>
>
>
> Can the  guerrilla system play a part in such a system
>
>
>
> Do such applications drive, support or influence NGN/IMS in anyway?
>
>
>
> Happy to get off line or online thoughts/experiences on this one too.
>
>
>
> Thanks again -   alan

[Banibrata Dutta]

Excuse me for what may be a very naive question...

 

In the event of an Emergency, when we say that P2P / Mesh / Guerrilla network would takeover, instead of the centralized / operator-provided IMS-based (or NGN arch based) services, but it assumes 2 things --

 

1) IP network connectivity continues to be available -- i.e. the transport continuity

2) There are mechanisms in place, that subscribers (who could be subject to an emergency) can be permitted or restricted from moving between P2P and Service-Provider/ Operator based centralized (grid-connected) telephony services, else P2P may be used in non emergent conditions as well.

Without knowing too much about P2P networks, I am wondering, if the solutions to those 2 questions (or issues, as I see), are well understood ?

 

regards,

Banibrata Dutta

--
regards,
Banibrata
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bdutta

[Tom Nolle (Public)]

It's a good question; this is what the US DHS was looking at when they wanted ideas on upgrading emergency communications services to work with IP.  The problem is that the PSTN is "stateful" and is based on admission control; you can make a call if you have dialtone.  The idea for the PSTN system is that first-responder types have a special card with a number and code they can dial and that gives them what is effectively a priority on resources for call setup.  In an IP network, as you point out, the problem is that packets are stateless and so you not only need a notion of how to GET a priority, you need to have a notion of how your traffic would be marked to know you'd been given it.  In theory, the process can be handled with IMS by the way you do the admission and resource control.  In P2P I'm doubtful you could even know the route of the traffic, so I'm not sure I see how it would work.  P2P gets around a local failure like a Class 5 switch since there are no specific switches used, but it doesn't get around the problem of a resource failure.  Would there be such a failure on a broad enough scale that P2P wouldn't work?  We don't really know, and DHS at least was concerned about the risk of a widespread problem.

Tom

Banibrata Dutta wrote:

[Banibrata Dutta]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 12:30 PM, alan lloyd <alan....@wwite.com> wrote:

Hi Banibrata -   not sure I get the drift   - but I don’t think it’s a take over issue – it’s a make everything work collectively at its best.    I would have assumed the UEs and “panic / SOS buttons in the home/shops and precincts could be laptops, mobile telephones or other wireless devices  wifi, wimax and even bluetooth  - And that under emergency conditions set that into operation -  We also see the need for deployable emergency nodes that gave either normal service continuity  or emergency channels. I would expect such devices to also provide telemetry and SOS alerts over dedicated channels back to the command centres.

Exactly. So the point I was intending to clarify (and not so much as make) was -- are we looking at an "IMS way" to replace this --

 

A hand-crank 2 way AM CB radio, that can serve as a RF/VR beacon, 2 way communication device, torch etc. ? In emergencies, when bush/forest fires can burn-down or bring-down transmission towers, facilities, equipment, "every man to himself" is what probably works best, the old fashioned way.

Most of the issues are not too much about specialized communications – what ever is there will be used. It really  comes back to management and command and control systems and what can be done to ensure that any means of communications can be used through standard devices and/or specialized equipment  that either is resident in bush fire prone areas, attached to public vehicles or dropped as and when the occasion needs..

Indeed, and I am aware of complete non-IMS (or even non NGN, in the VoIP context) way in which a global non-profit emergency relief organisation has deployed large-scale, distributed management infrastructure, as has the railways of atleast 2 countries that I am aware of, exactly for this purpose -- emergency situation handling. They use this infrastructure to deal with emergencies, and it extends well beyond just establishing communication.

 

It's a bit like folks using telegraphy devices and "morse code" to communicate, in the movie "Independence Day" :-)

So coming back to the very original question in the thread, looks like we for whatever 2.0 initiatives that may be around to tacle emergency situations, the most basic 0.1 forms of autonomous communications are the only ones that may stand the test of time in such trying circumstances.

 

---

[Josef Sevcik]

Hi all,

my 5 cents: I trust this topic has nothing to do with IMS, but is rather the access network problem. IMS has no mechanisms how to connect calls when access is out of order, only limited policy decision is supported (usefull for prioritisation/emergency, but still requires at least partly working access). If this new access leads to new core concept (as mesh networks surely do), there won't be place for IMS neither.

Anyway, to answer original question, there are access/combined solutions for emergency situation, to be used by integrated rescue system/team, take a look at E/// QuicLink.

BR,

Josef

[Mico Naddeo]

Matt,

A lot of work has been done to achieve this kind of mesh with the development of the XO laptop.
It is open source.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mesh_Network_Details

Regards,

Mico

Hi Alan,

Cheers

Matt

> ignites.  Statements -" its like 10 * 747s just above your head"..  "The

> wind was on fire",  "The aluminium tray on my truck had melted and the
> molten metal had run down my drive", put the scene into perspective.
>
> Winds then change direction - and the process gets repeated.
>
> Once we are through the initial and terrible losses, the follow on is we
> have burnt ash and carbon in our water catchment areas (carcinogenic) ,
> smoke tainted crops, a massive loss of wildlife and its habitat.
>
>
>
> I think from an operational perspective we need (for example) to drop/deploy
> multiple (fire and flood resistant ) wireless - telemetry capable , relay
> machinery.
>
> In our case these would contain location, motion, heat, smoke, wind and
> noise sensing / vision systems that can relay their intelligence back to
> base and at the same time collectively form a broadcast system and receive
> SOS messages.
>
>
>

> And from a "UE" perspective -please remember that we have an aging

>>> (who are over 80 too) that had to evacuate because of the fires - used
>>> the
>
>>> same line.. "We have never seen anything like it"... In the 80 years of

>>> their
>
>>> lives and where they live -  natures impact on their lives  this year has
>
>>> been at its worst.
>
>>>
>
>>> I also realise Australia is not alone in this. Many countries have had
>
>>> disasters too which have cost lives and property. There seems to be more
>>> and
>
>>> more natural (unnatural) situations occurring around the world. So is
>>> there
>
>>> anyone who is developing NGN, IMS or web 2.0  telco 2.0 etc.. looking at
>
>>> next gen emergency services from a NGN perspective (BTW I am not keen on
>
>>> "2.0"  promotions)
>
>>>
>
>>>
>
>>>
>
>>> Our 911/000   traditional telephone emergency services has been with us
>>> for
>
>>> decades  but  unfortunately disasters such as our bushfires took out our
>
>>> mobile repeaters, exchanges, radio stations,  power lines, roads and
>
>>> blackened the sky (satellite coverage?).. so there is no easy answer.
>
>>>
>
>>>
>
>>>
>
>>> The iMS emergency services work I perceive provides focus on bearer QoS
>>> and
>
>>> PSAP/identity / SIP exchange..  The issues we are facing are much larger
>
>>> than that..
>
>>>
>
>>>
>
>>>
>

>>>  NGN emergency systems ... any thoughts?

[Jose M Recio]

Following up this (a bit old) thread, I have stumbled upon a solution for emergencies and disasters, really interesting: Ad-hoc mesh with regular GSM handsets.

There is at least a company (TerraNet from Sweden) pursuing it, they claim phone-to-phone ranges about 1km, without needing the network.

Apart from the emergency scenarios, their focus is on enabling communications services that are affordable for really poor people (those leaving with 1$ per day). Other initiatives (OpenBTS project to name one) are working on a similar target.

I believe this is a very important topic, I think it hasn't appeared in the forum so far, I would love to know your thoughts on how IMS can help to reach that goal.

JM

---

De: Jose M Recio [mailto:re...@solaiemes.com]
Enviado el: martes, 24 de febrero de 2009 12:43
Para: 'lucia'; 'Gunnar Hellstrom'
CC: 'imsg...@imsforum.org'
Asunto: RE: [IMS Group] emergency situations

Not sure if this applies to Australia's events, but in many cases, amateur radio has proved itself as the best communication system in many situations where infrastructure has fallen down.

Peer to peer, loosely couple systems tend to be much more robust (e.g. the end-to-end principle that has taken the Internet to what it is now). Difficult to marry with the operator-based architectures, that are the main NGN focus, obviously makes a lot of sense for business reasons.

 

---

De: imsgroup...@imsforum.org [mailto:imsgroup...@imsforum.org] En nombre de lucia
Enviado el: martes, 24 de febrero de 2009 6:33
Para: Gunnar Hellstrom
CC: imsg...@imsforum.org
Asunto: Re: [IMS Group] emergency situations