Next-gen 911 system nears completion

CHICAGO -- Six years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks demonstrated weaknesses in the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure, the Internet engineering community has come up with a new way to handle emergency communications.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) plans to wrap up work on key components of its next-generation emergency communications system by year-end. The new system will support voice calls, text messages and images sent over the Internet.

The IETF working group in charge of the effort is called ECRIT for Emergency Context Resolution with Internet Technologies. ECRIT is developing a way to route emergency calls over the Internet similar to how 911 calls are routed over the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

"ECRIT’s general approach is agreed upon," said Jon Peterson, a NeuStar engineer and IETF area director who oversees the ECRIT work. "A lot of progress has been made . . . It’s the most promising approach to this problem, but it will take many years to migrate from the current 911 system to Internet-based communications."

ECRIT is expected to have a major impact on service providers, including traditional wireline and wireless carriers and start-up VoIP carriers.

The ECRIT working group has spent more than two years developing a strategy for directing Internet calls to emergency response agencies.

Now, with ECRIT nearing completion, the IETF is considering follow-on work for a communications system that emergency response agencies can use to broadcast safety messages over the Internet following terrorist attacks or natural disasters.

Peterson said the follow-on work is promising, but he doesn’t "want to see it slow down work on ECRIT."

Here’s how emergency calls work today: The PSTN has been configured to recognize specific numbers such as 911 or 112 as being calls for emergency services. These calls are sent to special call centers that handle emergency response. The calls are associated with the physical location of the call originator so they can be routed to the appropriate emergency call center.

The current 911 system will not work for voice, text or real-time multimedia communications sent over the Internet. The ECRIT working group has developed a way for IP-based phones, mobile devices and network gear such as proxy servers to handle 911-style emergency services.

The ECRIT working group has developed techniques for identifying IP calls as emergency requests, describing the location of the call originator and routing the call to the closest emergency call center.

The group recently finished a requirements document for ECRIT systems, and it is near completion of documents that define emergency services globally and list known security threats.

At a meeting held in Chicago on Monday, the ECRIT group said its Location-to-Service Translation (LOST) protocol, which maps locations to appropriate services and information, should be done in October. The group plans to finalize an overall framework for Internet-based emergency services and a best common practices document by December.