In the ECRIT meeting at IETF 73, Hannes proposed forming a Design Team on
what I'll call "IP-to-location" mapping. He correctly observed that
several planned architectures for VoIP emergency calling involve PSAPs or
VSPs doing something like the following process in order to get location
information for endpoints:
1. Gets an emergency call from a caller at a given IP address
2. Determine the ISP responsible for that IP address
3. Fetch location from the ISP
The solution above is *obviously* a hack, because step 2 involves a lot of
uncertainty on any reasonable scale. However, the problem it addresses is
real, especially in the short term: How should a VSP route a call if
endpoints don't support location? (Likewise, how should a PSAP get
location if VSPs and endpoints don't support location?)
In order to address this problem, some sort of IP-to-location mapping will
be required. As Jon pointed out in the meeting, this will not be solvable
for the general Internet, for the same reason that we've always assumed
that ISPs and VSPs are decoupled. However, I think this mapping can be
enabled in certain circumstances, if the parties involved (ISPs,
VSPs/PSAPs) have the right relationships and implement the right things.
(Purposely vague, because I don't have a solution!)
So I'd like to suggest that ECRIT think about a document of the following
form:
1. Problem statement: Need to route emergency calls even when endpoints
don't support location (get endpoint location at the PSAP when endpoints
and VSPs don't provide it)
2. How and when this problem can be solved (and why it doesn't scale up to
Internet)
3. How to transition from this system to the ECRIT architecture
I don't know if I'm the best person to write such a document, but I'd be
glad to help out.
--Richard
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