Internet Engineering Task Force

Emergency Context Resolution with Internet Technologies (ecrit)

Last Modified: 2010-10-19

Additional information is available at tools.ietf.org/wg/ecrit

Chair(s):

Real-time Applications and Infrastructure Area Director(s):

Description of Working Group:

In a number of areas, the public switched telephone network (PSTN) has
been configured to recognize an explicitly specified number (commonly
one that is short and easily memorized) as a call for emergency
services. These numbers (e.g. 911, 112) relate to an emergency
service context and depend on a broad, regional configuration of
service contact methods and a geographically-constrained context of
service delivery. These calls are intended to be delivered to special
call centers equipped to manage emergency response. Successful
delivery of an emergency service call within those systems requires
both an association of the physical location of the originator with an
appropriate emergency service center and call routing to deliver the
call to the center.

Calls placed using Internet technologies do not use the same systems
to achieve those goals, and the common use of overlay networks and
tunnels (either as VPNs or for mobility) makes meeting them more
challenging. There are, however, Internet technologies available to
describe location and to manage call routing. This working group will
describe when these may be appropriate and how they may be used.
Explicitly outside the scope of this group is the question of
pre-emption or prioritization of emergency services traffic. This
group is considering emergency services calls which might be made by
any user of the Internet, as opposed to government or military
services that may impose very different authentication and routing
requirements.

The group will show how the availability of location data and call
routing information at different steps in session setup would enable
communication between a user and a relevant emergency response
center. Though the term "call routing" is used in this document, it
should be understood that some of the mechanisms which will be
described might be used to enable other types of media streams. Video
and text messaging, for example, might be used to request emergency
services.

While this group anticipates a close working relationship with groups
such as NENA and ETSI EMTEL, any solution presented must be useful
regardless of jurisdiction, and it must be possible to use without a
single, central authority. Further, it must be possible for multiple
delegations within a jurisdiction to be handled independently, as call
routing for specific emergency types may be independent.

This working group cares about privacy and security concerns, and will
address them within its documents.

Goals and Milestones:

Done		Informational RFC containing terminology definitions and the requirements
Done		An Informational document describing the threats and security considerations
Done		A Standards Track RFC describing how to identify a session set-up request is to an emergency response center
Done		A Standards Track RFC describing how to route an emergency call based on location information
Done		An Informational document describing the Mapping Protocol Architecture
Done		Submit 'Location Hiding: Problem Statement and Requirements' to the IESG for consideration as an Informational RFC.
Done		Submit 'Framework for Emergency Calling using Internet Multimedia' to the IESG for consideration as an Informational RFC.
Done		Submit 'Best Current Practice for Communications Services in support of Emergency Calling' to the IESG for consideration as a BCP document
Done		Submit 'LoST Extension for returning Boundary Information for Services' to the IESG for consideration as an Experimental RFC
Oct 2010		Submit 'Synchronizing Location-to-Service Translation (LoST) Protocol based Service Boundaries and Mapping Elements' to the IESG for consideration as an Experimental RFC
Nov 2010		Submit 'Using Imprecise Location for Emergency Call Routing' to the IESG for consideration as an Informational RFC
Mar 2011		Submit 'Additional Data related to a Call for Emergency Call Purposes' to the IESG for consideration as a Standards Track RFC
Apr 2011		Submit 'Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) based Data-Only Emergency Alerts using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)' to the IESG for consideration as an Experimental RFC
Dec 2011		Submit 'Extensions to the Emergency Services Architecture for dealing with Unauthenticated and Unauthorized Devices' to the IESG for consideration as a Standards Track RFC
Jan 2012		Submit 'Trustworthy Location Information' to the IESG for consideration as an Informational RFC
Mar 2012		Submit 'Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) Callbacks' to the IESG for consideration as an Informational RFC

Internet-Drafts:

Best Current Practice for Communications Services in support of Emergency Calling (58367 bytes)
Framework for Emergency Calling using Internet Multimedia (96553 bytes)
Location Hiding: Problem Statement and Requirements (20127 bytes)
Synchronizing Location-to-Service Translation (LoST) Protocol based Service Boundaries and Mapping Elements (50276 bytes)
Using Imprecise Location for Emergency Context Resolution (44367 bytes)
Extensions to the Emergency Services Architecture for dealing with Unauthenticated and Unauthorized Devices (45565 bytes)

Request For Comments:

Requirements for Emergency Context Resolution with Internet Technologies (RFC 5012) (54599 bytes)
A Uniform Resource Name (URN) for Emergency and Other Well-Known Services (RFC 5031) (32960 bytes)
Security Threats and Requirements for Emergency Call Marking and Mapping (RFC 5069) (26230 bytes)
LoST: A Location-to-Service Translation Protocol (RFC 5222) (123252 bytes)
Discovering Location-to-Service Translation (LoST) Servers Using the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) (RFC 5223) (14936 bytes)
Location-to-URL Mapping Architecture and Framework (RFC 5582) (42078 bytes)
Specifying Holes in Location-to-Service Translation (LoST) Service Boundaries (RFC 5964) (21269 bytes)
Location-to-Service Translation (LoST) Service List Boundary Extension (RFC 6197) (27562 bytes)