I. Emergency Communications for Major Incident Management

Efficient communication and coordination are major challenges experienced by the emergency services (firebrigade, police, ambulance) during the first response to a major incident. A major incident can happen anywhere and at any time, hence support for emergency communications services should be ubiquitous and independent of communication technologies and infrastructure used. We present a vision of how ambient intelligent environments may be used in the future to support the emergency services during first response to a major incident. Support includes enabling emergency communications and biomedical monitoring for front line personnel. In this paper we focus on the possibilities and challenges raised by using the GAN (Generalized Access Network) infrastructure to support ambient intelligent services and emergency services (fire-brigade, police, ambulance) for major incident management. I. EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS FOR MAJOR INCIDENT MANAGEMENT FFICIENT communication between, and coordination amongst, different agencies and teams are amongst the major challenges experienced by the emergency and rescue services during the first response to a major incident. This observation holds for many different types of major incident; whether it be a large scale natural disaster in a remote area (such as earthquake, flood or volcanic eruption) or a major accident in an urban setting caused by human error or system failure (such as major transportation or industrial accidents) [1] or an incident resulting from deliberate action (e.g. an act of war, terrorism or sabotage) [2]. In all cases, management of the first response involves coordination of teams from a number of different agencies, which may include emergency medical services, fire services, police and security services, local and national government agencies and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) as well as the specially convened disaster coordination team. Large incidents may be spread across national boundaries, or may overwhelm the response capability of one country, thus requiring international cooperation in first (and subsequent) response phases, further complicating this very challenging coordination task. The communication problem is further exacerbated if telecommunications are disrupted 1 University of Twente/CTIT/ The Netherlands. [email protected], [email protected] 2 Twente Institute for Wireless and Mobile Communications/ University of Twente [email protected] through destruction of communications infrastructure. Depending on the circumstances such incidents are sometimes complicated by environmental risk factors such as the possibility of chemical, biological or radiological pollution. These risk factors have to be recognised, monitored, contained and managed as part of the response. A major incident can happen anywhere any time, therefore the support for emergency communication services should be ubiquitous and should be independent of the communication technologies and infrastructure used. In this paper we focus on the possibilities and challenges raised by using the GAN (Generalized Access Network) infrastructure to support ambient intelligent services and emergency services (fire-brigade, police, ambulance) for major incident management. A GAN is a common fourth generation mobile and wireless access network, including different types of air interfaces, based on a flexible and seamless All-IP (Internet Protocol) infrastructure. The solution should be able to provide the following: Security support: Security is a most critical issue, especially in case of deliberate attacks such as terrorist incidents, since the emergency communication systems themselves will become a high-tech target for terrorists in order to increase confusion and disruption of the rescue effort. Resilience support: When a major incident occurs, one or more nodes and links in the wired network infrastructure may be damaged or destroyed. It is crucial to develop resilience mechanisms that provide fast connectivity restoration to minimize disruption of the prevailing Quality of Service (QoS) requirements as well as efficient node protection mechanisms. The quality of resilience mechanisms need to be judged by appropriate QoS-based criteria that differentiate between various QoS models, and the type of network in which they should apply. In conjunction with this, link state discovery mechanisms have to be developed that can be used for the immediate discovery of efficient end-to-end paths. Mobility and load distribution support: The end-to-end connectivity and routing are affected by the mobility of mobile devices and the mechanisms used in mobility solutions. Solutions have to be provided to support the mobility, routing and load distribution within ad-hoc networks and the GAN. Network management support: For automated network management integrated across diverse network environments, an overlay network management scheme is Support of Future Disaster Response Using Generalized Access Networks (GANs) Georgios Karagiannis, Val Jones, Sonia Heemstra de Groot