Internet Engineering Task Force H. Ohno
INTERNET-DRAFT R. Atarashi
Communications Research Lab., Japan
November 2001
The Emergency Communications on the internet
draft-hohno-ecs-00
Status of this Memo
This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.
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Abstract
It will be strongly required to provide internet services even in an
emergency since the internet is one of the most important
communication infrastructures. Therefore, it is necessary to
prepare special communication functoin such as victims' information
exchange and the disaster information transmission system. It is
also necessary to introduce priority control mechanism for the
emergency communication. We need to start discussion about the
emergency communication systems on the Internet.
1. Introduction
The importance of the internet has been increasing even in an
emergency situation such as natural disasters and terrible attack by
terrorism. On the next generation Internet, it will be strongly
required to provide reliable internet services even in an emergency
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since the internet is one of the most important communication
infrastructures.
In order to continue developing the new internet service and it
standardization, definitions of a number of new functions and
consensus for operation are necessary. They are not only in one
layer but are also related to many other layers. It is also
recommended that a large number of people from many fields such as
governments, administrations, carriers, operators, researchers and
developers are expected to attend this standardization activity.
The following two issues are the purpose of this memo.
1. To start discussion about the status of measures for the
emergency communications in each organization.
2. To start discussion about establishing the cooperation and
collaboration system about emergency communications in the world.
2. The internet in an emergency
In this chapter, we discuss and define some concepts in this memo.
2.1 In an emergency
In this memo, we define "in an emergency" as the situation that the
people and their life may be damaged by unexpected and dangerous
situation, such as natural disaster or accident. The special
operations are required to recover from the damages. For example,
when the big earthquake or flood occurs, many people are damaged,
some people may disappear, and rescues activities are required in
these circumstances.
2.2 The internet infrastructure in an emergency
The internet communication is a very good solution for data
transmission. Especially text data transmission using the internet
has long and sucessful history. Even if the communication quality
is insufficient and data transmission is often failed because of the
damage by the disaster, information exchange can be achieved because
it is possible to transmit small size of divided data over the
internet. The topology and routing mechanism of the internet add
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redundancy to the internet. Therefore, if a part of lines is
damaged, transmitted data can bypass the point of failure and reach
to the destination. Generally, the natural disaster area severely
is restricted, however the communication infrastructure operates
normally outside of this area.
2.3 The internet services in an emergency
When a large-scale natural disaster occurs, disaster victims need to
exchange information with other victims or people outside disaster
area in a frequent manner. WWW and database services for publish
several information about disaster are required.
It SHOULD make use of the internet more effectively in an emergency,
it is required to make discussions and consensus at the IETF.
3. Internet technology in an emergency.
Some communication functions are necessary in an emergency stuation.
For example, victims' information exchange and the disaster
information transmission are necessary in the disaster area. As for
the internet, even these scenes play an important part of
communication function. And the internet MUST keep playing an
important role.
In this section, we describe the emergency communication support
system that we have being developing and evaluating, and priority
control on the emergency communications. And we have been insisting
its about the necessity to standardize many functions for the
emergency communications on the internet.
3.1 The emergency communication support system
WIDE(Widely Integrated Distributed Environment) project, a well-
known research consortium on the internet technology in Japan, has
been developing an emergency communication system called IAA (which
is named after "I am alive") since 1995. [1] This system consists of
various user interfaces and scalable and robust distributed database
system. It has already supported many actual recovery activities in
natural disaster in Japan. It provides registration and retrieval of
information for victims.
Since these systems are expected to prepare each country or each
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organization, the function of an emergency information exchange is
required. The standards for an emergency information exchange model
and data exchange protocol for distributed database and usage of
metadata (structure data about data, it indicate contents of
information) are required.
3.2 The priority control on the emergency communications
It SHOULD give more priority to the emergency communications than
the usual communications.
The communication of an emergency is required with higher priority
than other communications. The priority control on the emergency
communications (voice data and multimedia communication) has been
discussed on some documents such as ITU-T E.106 and F.706
Recommendation.[3][4]
The priority control of the internet is required additional
considerations. The introduction of the data management scheme such
as using "metadata" may be necessary to indicate that the emergency
information SHOULD be processed immediately.
We MUST proceed with the standardization of the policy of the
priority control in the emergency communication.
4. Discussion
According to the discussion, we found many standardization
activities and consensus were needed across the several layers in
order to provide reliable internet services continuously in an
emergency. These functions described below are examples that
standardizations are required.
- Priority control policy
- Operation policy
- Victims information exchange model
- Victims information exchange protocol for distributed databases
- Some other mechanisms bridge over several independent emergency
communications systems
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5. Milestones
Dec 01 Submit the first Internet-Draft of the emergency communications.
Dec 01 Meet at Salt Lake City as BOF to review the first Internet-Draft and discussion.
Mar 01 Submit the second Internet-Draft of the emergency communications.
Mar 01 Meet at Minneapolis as BOF to review the second Internet-Draft and discussion.
Jul 02 Meet at Yokohama to discussion.
6. Summary
We described necessarily of the emergency communications on the
internet and insist about the necessity to standardize many internet
functions in an emergency.
7. References
[1] Nobuhiko TADA, Yukimitsu IZAWA, Masahiko KIMOTO, Taro MARUYAMA,
Hiroyuki OHNO, Masaya NAKAYAMA, "IAA System (I Am Alive)": The
Experiences of the Internet Disaster Drills", INET'00, 2000, June.
[2] IAA system home pages, http://www.crl-iaa.net,
http://www.iaa.wide.ad.jp/
[3] ITU-T Recommendation E.106 (2000), International Emergency
Preference Scheme (IEPS)
[4] ITU-T Recommendation F.706 (2001), International Emergency
Multimedia Services (IEMS)
8. Author's Address
Hiroyuki Ohno
Communications Research Laboratory
4-2-1 Nukui-kitamachi Koganei
Tokyo 184-8795 Japan
TEL: +1 81 42 327 5542
FAX: +1 81 42 327 7941
Email: hohno@ohnolab.org
Rei S. Atarashi
Communications Research Laboratory
4-2-1 Nukui-kitamachi Koganei
Tokyo 184-8795 Japan
TEL: +1 81 42 327 5542
FAX: +1 81 42 327 7941
Email: ray@ohnolab.org
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