IETF plans emergency system for Internet

The Internet's premier standards-setting body is developing a plan for prioritizing voice and data communications sent by public safety officials via the Internet in the event of a disaster.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) held the first meeting of its Internet Emergency Preparedness working group in Minneapolis this week. Under consideration for more than a year, the working group wasn't formed until after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks underscored the superiority of the Internet as a reliable communications infrastructure.

The working group's goal is to figure out how the Internet can give preferential treatment to disaster recovery communications in the event of a hurricane, flood, earthquake or terrorist attack. Among the applications required by emergency management agencies are voice, video, instant messaging, e-mail, database services and Web browsing.

The working group will create three standards-track documents that outline the requirements for emergency communications over the Internet, a framework for meeting those requirements and advice for using Internet protocols to handle emergency communications.

Former IETF chair Fred Baker, a Cisco Systems executive who is leading the emergency preparedness working group, says the documents should be completed by August.

"This is the classic problem of bringing the telephone world and the [Internet] world together," Baker says. "It's pretty important to a particular set of people."

The U.S. government's National Communications System office originally asked the IETF to develop a scheme for handling disaster-relief communications in August 2000. But little progress was made until December 2001, when a working group was chartered.

The U.S. government wants the Internet to prioritize disaster-relief communications in a way that is similar to a capability already available in the public switched telephone system through the Government Emergency Telecommunications Service (GETS). Supported by AT&T, Worldcom and Sprint, the government-funded GETS program provides priority communications for PBX and cellular telephone calls and faxes.

About 60,000 public safety and utility workers have access to special calling cards that allow them to place GETS calls. These calls, which use the 710 area code, are given preferential treatment by the switches in the public telephone system. While they do not pre-empt other calls, GETS calls have a higher probability of being successfully completed.

As more voice communications are routed over the Internet, the U.S. government is looking to migrate GETS to the Internet. Essentially, the U.S. government wants the ability to mark packets going through the Internet as emergency communications and then develop a plan to ensure these packets get preferential treatment by all the ISPs that carry them. Government officials and contractors argue that adding a GETS-like capability will not have a major impact on the Internet's performance.

"On Sept. 11, we had a lot of [telephone] congestion in New York City and Washington D.C., but only one out of 100,000 calls were GETS calls," says Kimberly King, a network engineer at Science Applications International who supports the GETS program. "GETS doesn't have a big impact on the [public switched telephone network] because there are very few authorized callers. But the PBXs, the payphones and the residential phones all have to understand the 710 area code."

Moving GETS to the Internet has the added benefit of providing emergency-relief workers with new applications such as e-mail, instant messaging, shared whiteboards, Web browsing, audio and video.

Members of the IETF's emergency preparedness working group say they can meet the GETS requirement by tapping existing signaling standards such as the Session Initiation Protocol, which is used to initiate voice-over-IP calls, and Differentiated Services, or DiffServ, which can differentiate among classes of network traffic. The group also must set policies for the GETS-like system, establish traffic engineering strategies and address security needs.

"This is pretty straightforward work. It's not too technically difficult," Baker says, adding that he anticipates the group will not need to develop any new protocols.

Baker said the working group will meet again in May and July to finalize its work.

Although the U.S. government is pushing hardest for the IETF to develop the emergency preparedness scheme, other nations including Japan and the U.K. are also testing Internet-based emergency communications.