Emergency Management Information Exchange Requirements beyond Voice, Video, and Data

Abstract

Major emergencies or disasters may result in a need for additional resources in local telecommunications networks in order to maintain or enhance the ability of emergency services to respond and coordinate their activities effectively. Satellites can play a role in replacing or supplementing terrestrial telecommunications networks in these scenarios. However, there are currently no publicly available emergency management best practices that could provide standardized "user" requirements, particularly any based on realistic field activity and which are agnostic to the communications technology and yet provide enough elements to derive more technical requirements. Within the Working Group on Satellite Emergency Communication (SatEC) of ETSI’s Technical Committee for Satellite Earth Stations and Systems (TC SES) two specifications of "reference scenarios" were developed describing both the information exchanges between roles/actors and topology models of emergency services' deployment and movements. More precisely, two basic settings were addressed: (i) a major earthquake in an urban environment where responders from various emergency services are likely to be distributed over a large area, and (ii) a mass transportation accident in a countryside environment with few services involved and where responders are concentrated on a small area. Keeping track of all concurrent activities is a key objective of efficient emergency management. Vertical and horizontal information exchanges within emergency services, between the on-site and off-site area, but also between different services are mandatory. A simplistic characterisation of these information flows as "voice, video, and data" does not reflect the actual needs of the disaster response and therefore the scenario complexity. In fact, all required communication services are driven by "virtual topologies" which are defined by emergency service specialities, levels of hierarchies, tasks/roles, activities, and logistics. The aforementioned reference scenarios take this into account and provide detailed investigation of information flows as well as modelling instructions. In the presentation we will briefly introduce the objectives and contents of the new ETSI technical specifications and discuss the role of satellite communications for emergency management. As an outlook we will show that especially data applications need to be treated jointly with the underlying network technologies so that the requirements of emergency management can be met.