NGN PLATFORMS FOR EMERGENCY

Communication among rescue agencies involved in the management of emergency situations is a fundamental but critical topic for which they still miss effective and easy-to-use solutions. The paper presents PICO (Platforms for service control and delivery in convergent networks) [MIUR 2006] project results, aimed to the development of “innovative platforms for control and delivery of services in next generation networks (NGN)” proposing it as an innovative communication way to be used during prevention and management of emergencies situations. The project dealt with the development of new telecom services to be delivered on large bandwidth networks, focusing on convergence between fixed-mobile phone networks by mean of IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) platform [Camarilli and Garcia-Martin, 2006]. With the new proposed system, telecommunication services based on IT platforms are provided to different end-users for communicating during critical situations to prevent and/or manage emergency crisis. They would allow the establishment of communication channels that are not limited to voice, but may involve the use of ad-hoc designed applications able to enhance the flow of information exchanged between the caller (requiring the intervention of emergency) and the control room, to achieve the goal of an optimized association client server able to exploit the full potential of both parties. An experimentation based on IMS platform will be presented, focussing on how the complex IMS structure must be adapted and extended to provide a fixed access to fixed and mobile telecom operators. In particular it specifies the way for implementing a prototype analysing the features offered by IMS system for "context-aware" application streaming, and, in general, in remote applications usage by means of a virtual access to different protocols compliant with IMS system. In such a way, during the prevention and emergency management it would 1 CEFRIEL ICT Centre of Excellence for Research, Innovation, Education and Industrial Labs partnership – Via R. Fucini, 2 10133 Milan – Italy – e.mail: flavio.giovanelli@cefriel.it, sara.grilli@cefriel.it, francesco.pistillo@cefriel.it, lucia.defrancesco@cefriel.it 2 Politecnico di Torino, Dept. of Control and Computer Engineering Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24 10129 Torino, Italy – e.mail: luca.ardito@polito.it, jose.mejiabernal@polito.it, ,maurizio.morisio@polito.it be possible to easily activate different services which would improve communication allowing data exchange.