Researchers Developing Internet 911 System
A coalition of leading universities, hardware makers and local emergency districts is developing a new generation of Internet-based 911 technologies and standards. The I-911 initiative is a 2-year, $1.2 million project that will investigate open-standard VoIP location approaches as well as IM and on-scene video. The project is funded in part by the NTIA and coordinated by the Internet 2 Consortium.
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The main goal is to solve the location problem presented by VoIP phones, said lead investigator Walter Magnussen, dir. for telecom at Tex. A&M U. Assisting Magnussen are teams from Columbia U., the U. of Va., the National Emergency Number Assn. (NENA), Cisco Systems and Nortel. Before a call goes to a 911 answering center, it goes through a central database to determine the caller’s location. “That’s what we're trying to get away from,” said Magnussen. “A centralized database will never work in a VoIP environment.” That’s because IP calls can be programmed to ring at various locations.
The solution is to enable IP phones to declare their locations automatically. How to do that is one of the biggest challenges of the project, said Magnussen. One possibility is to tag a location field onto the dynamic IP addressing system used for VoIP calls. “The network would know where you are plugged in,” said Rick Jones, operations issues dir. for NENA. GPS is another possibility, but underground locations could be hard to pinpoint due to interference, Magnussen said. A team at Columbia U. will puzzle over the problem, led by Henning Schulzrinne, chmn. of the Computer Science Dept.
Mobile and LAN-based IP phones present a special challenge, said researchers, because the phones wouldn’t know the nearest 911 center to call. One possibility, said Jones, is to use the Domain Name System to pinpoint the closest call center.
The project will build 2 VoIP-based prototype workstations and locate them at 911 call centers in College Station, Tex., and near the U. of Va.- Charlottesville, according to the I-911 grant proposal. Cisco and Nortel will help develop the workstations and Nortel will supply source code to switches and applications needed to make the system work.
The workstations and incoming calls will be tied together using 10 Mbps connections, which can allow video information to be transmitted from the scene of an emergency via picture phones or video conferencing. “Once you're in an IP environment, why not take advantage of these capabilities?” said Magnussen. - Randy Barrett