Hannes Tschofenig

Technological advancements, including the widespread adoption of voice over IP and location based services, can open up new ways for service providers to respond to emergency calls. As communication moves beyond voice and conventional text telephony, the emergency services of the future could create sessions of any media type negotiated between the caller and the Public Safety Answering Point, using SIP protocol mechanisms

Before this can become a reality, several issues have to be addressed. Will regulatory policies shift with the push for emergency services to be carried out over the Internet? And will common international standards be in place to ensure safe and reliable emergency communications that work anytime, anywhere?

The Asia Pacific Emergency Services workshop brings participants into the dialogue with world industry experts to examine the trends, policies and issues shaping emergency services.

Discuss the changing face of emergency services:

• What forces and trends are shaping the emergency services of the future?
• How do emergency communications work on the PSTN, cellular networks and on the Internet?
• How are regulatory policies evolving with the shift to Internet communication?

Learn insights from industry experts:

• What are standards groups doing to ensure safety and reliability for communication over the Internet?
• Will a common international standard emerge?
• What best practices can be learned from field trials and deployments in other countries?

Engage with international speakers and experts:

Catch this sixth installment in the Emergency Services Workshop series, debuting for the first time in Asia Pacific, and brought to you by Andrew Solutions, A CommScope Company. Be there to engage with regulators, network operators, VoIP providers, Internet service providers, standardization experts, researchers and emergency service providers.

About the Emergency Services Workshop:

The Emergency Services Workshop series is an ongoing effort in the emergency services community to coordinate global standards and technologies for emergency call and emergency notification. The primary focus of the workshop series is to foster coordination among the many standards development organizations involved in emergency services as they work toward a global solution for emergency communications using Internet technologies

More information can be found at http://www.emergency-services-coordination.info/esw6.html

REACH112 (Responding to all citizens needing help) is a three-year project partially funded by the European Commission under the ICT PSP CIP programme gathering 22 partners from all over Europe, including user organisations and major global telecommunications companies. In five countries, it will deploy a new text/voice/video communication solution to allow thousands of people to communicate in video, voice and text simultaneously, with special focus on disabled people.  The project will offer access to relay services to help connect users with different abilities to others and will also provide access to the emergency services.

The European emergency number 112, which is used to contact emergency services free of charge all over the EU, is currently not accessible to the majority of disabled people. However this is set to change with the start of REACH112, a new five-country initiative in France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain and the UK, which will introduce improved communication solutions for disabled people, allowing them direct access to emergency services, a potentially life saving feature.

“REACH112 will test innovative solutions to ensure that 112 can be reached by every citizen all over the European Union and set the guidelines for the take-up of new communication technologies by EU emergency services”, commented Olivier Paul-Morandini, president and founder of the European Emergency Number Association.

Users will also be able to call each other in video, voice and text via the Internet, across national boundaries. It will also allow sign language users to communicate through remote interpreting services, and via other relay services, using text to talk to voice users.

“The REACH 112 project initiative will provide modes of communication to find a way to communicate in each situation, may it be with a live real-time text conversation, with sign language, with lip reading, with voice or with any simultaneous combination of these modes. This will also be a major step ahead for persons with disabilities in the equality to access emergency services in a society designed for all”, concluded Carlotta Besozzi, Director of the European Disability Forum (EDF) and adviser to the project.

For more information, please visit the project website www.reach112.eu

Press Contact:

Gary Machado
European Emergency Number Association
Tel: +32 (0)2 53 49 789 and +32 (0) 498 375 962
Email: gm@eena.org

Uberto Delprato
IES Solutions
Tel: +39-348-3432513
Email: u.delprato@i4es.it

The sixth Emergency Services Workshop will be held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia the week before the IETF meeting in Hiroshima. The dates for the event at the 4th and 5th of November.

More details on the event can be found here: http://www.emergency-services-coordination.info/esw6.html

We expect a registration page to be available early next week and I will send an update when registration is fully open. There will be NO registration fee this time and a tentative agenda is also available.

Please keep this event in mind as it is the first of these that we have been able to host in Asia.

The Networking 2009 conference took place from the 11th to the 15th May 2009 in Aachen, Germany. Attached to the conference were a couple of workshops; the 2nd International Workshop on Mobile and Wireless Networks Security (MWNS’09) was one of them. I had the honor to give the keynote speech about “Mobility and Security: The Tussles Continue”. I have chosen this title because I noticed a fairly huge gap between what is standardized and what finds it way into deployment and the gap from research to deploy in the area of mobility is almost insane. So, I was wondering what the value of a lot of standardization & research efforts are (other than being nice on paper, which is already suffient for a lot of people).

I produced a slide set that went through some of the mobility protocols and asked around what the deployment situation is (unless I knew it already). Mobility is particularly interesting because a lot of the folks working on this topic have a good understanding of network layer protocols although only certain application layer protocols benefit from it. Unfortunately, persons with knowledge of network layer protocols AND application layer protocols are hard to find and one of the favorite applications, namely voice-over-IP, is also a fairly complex beast from a business and regulatory point of view (as I had to learn with my involvement in IP-based emergency service).

Anyway, here is the slide set:

When you click through the slides you will notice that I don’t see a bright future for HIP and MIP. My main argument is that the incentives are not right. Now, you would probably wonder why I contribute to these protocols. Well, I think that they are technically a good idea. I still hope that Dual Stack Mobile IPv6 will see some deployment IFF some of the protocol design bugs are fixed, namely

1. Mobile Node to Home Agent Security needs to be much less complex to implement.
2. Route Optimization has to work in the current Internet (i.e., one that is full of middleboxes).

If these two aspects cannot be fixed for MIPv6 then I don’t see a reason why someone would even think about deploying it. (Please note that my thinking about Proxy Mobile IP is significantly different because the deployment incentives are easier to understand for those who are in the position to deploy it. It is, however, less interesting for researchers…).

It would be interesting to get your feedback to my slide set.

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Update (23. July 2009): Christian Schlatter noticed that some of the links in the presentation cannot be clicked at (and they are not shown either). So, here is the Powerpoint slide set.

Jari Arkko provided a nice summary of some of the BOFs that have been proposed for the Stockholm IETF meeting in July:

Multipath-TCP: I have already approved this BOF, but we do need more feedback on how it should be run, scoped, etc.

Multimob: I suspect we have not made real progress since the last BOF.
There is some energy though. I’m open to suggestions on what we should do here.

Netext: I would like to run the second slot of NETEXT as a real BOF (including possibly getting new chairs). I think we need some serious architectural guidance here as well. The various sides of the argument are too deep in their positions to be very constructive in discussion.
How can we best get an impartial analysis, the architectural guidance, and a civil discussion?

Eapfix: This is about Glen Zorn’s belief that a number of EAP documents have severe problems, and he wants to fix them. However, there is no document detailing what the problems are, no mailing list, etc. No BOF should be held for this, but the ADs need to work with Glen on determining if there’s something to do, and if so, is there energy to do it. I think the next step is that Glen writes a clear document on what the problems are, otherwise this is a non-starter.

More information can be found on the IETF BOF page.

What is this about?

At IETF#74 (“San Francisco”) a BOF was held discussing potential work on early warning in the IETF known as “Authority-to-Citizen (ATOCA)”. The BOF went well and there was a lot of interest to start some work. Soon after the BOF discussions around the charter text started, see here. It appears that the scope of the work needs to be hashed out a bit more in order to complete the charter text.

I proposed a few suggestions regarding the scope and to depricate the term “authority” given that there are a lot of emotions attached to it with little added technical content.

Where are the slides from the IETF ATOCA meeting?

Good question. The chairs have never uploaded them. Here are mine:

Here are the slides you can download.

Where do the discussions take place?

The discussion is taking place on this list: https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/earlywarning

Subscribe to it, get involved and state your opinion.

Where can I find some of the discussed documents?

There are essentially two documents that are relevant for this discussion, namely

1. Requirements, Terminology and Architecture
2. SIP Event Package for the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP)

The requirements document got updated to re-use the terminology defined in Internet Email architecture.

I like coffee; no secret. Jouni Korhonen sent me a nice picture that I would like to share with you:

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Jason Livingood sent around a proposal for a BOF in Stockholm. Here is what he wrote:

This is an open call for participation in the new “homegate” mailing list, which is dedicated to discussing issues relating to broadband home gateway devices.  There has been a BoF request submitted relating to this, which you can find at here.

This work is centered on three key themes:

(1) work to improve the network experience a home user gets,

(2) work to keep home networks secure, and

(3) work to bring new functionality to home users.  You can find many more details in the PDF document that is referred to above.

If this topic is of interest to you, please join our new mailing list at https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/homegate.  One of our first discussions for the mailing list will be to discuss a problem statement, work on a possible draft charter, and more.

Jari Arkko just sent around this mail:

Here’s another BOF proposal for Stockholm. Its a transport area BOF, but I have promised to help Magnus and Lars on this case, given that Lars is one of the proponents and Magnus will be on vacation for much of the time before the IETF. All the material should be available from

http://trac.tools.ietf.org/area/tsv/trac/wiki/MultipathTcp

And the primary specification is

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ford-mptcp-multiaddressed-00

This is a design that comes out of a research project called Trilogy (UCL, UC3M, Nokia etc). It has also been one of the models discussed in the RRG. The basic idea is that you can do multihoming at the TCP layer so that a host can employ all available paths simultaneously. Different paths are chosen through the use of different source/destination addresses or interfaces. The model has some nice theoretical properties, such as the ability to use network capacity to its maximum. It also has a number of nice practical properties. For instance, I believe the protocols can be constructed so that each separate flow looks like its own TCP session to an on-path firewall. And I don’t think applications are impacted. But the proposal also shares some of the properties that Shim6 was criticized for. For instance, it requires host changes, network management becomes complicated if multiple prefixes are needed, etc. However, it does solve a number of problems that Shim6 had. In particular, the transport layer feels like the right architectural place in the stack, given that it is aware of the throughput, packet loss, etc.

Other background information: They are asking for a experimental RFCs and a place to work out the protocol details in the IETF. This would be very much like the Lisp WG. There are two existing implementations and at least one other coming up.

Some of the issues about this effort include:

1) There are some variations of the protocol design. I think these can largely be left for the WG to work out; in the BOF I’m more interested in clarity about the big picture than detailed fights about protocol variants… but we may need discussions with the proponents on what gets presented.

2) The SCTP folk have expressed interest that the BOF should be scoped to look at the use of multiple paths in any transport protocol (SCTP and TCP at least). My current thinking is that it would be better to concentrate on TCP only. Its the practical, deployable extension that we could develop. The BOF should focus on the question of whether this should be done or not.

3) If the community agrees the work should be done, where should it happen (new WG, TCPM, etc)? Perhaps we can postpone this discussion for later, but for now its clear that we’re at least not going forward without a public BOF process.

4) How serious are the remaining Shim6-like issues? (E.g., inability of network providers to control this multihoming or sudden changes of addresses underneath, affecting, e.g., IPsec policy)

5) There are no commercial vendors who have expressed interest to implement this in their products, at least not yet.

6) Some other things that I can’t think of right now — I am very familiar with the background of this effort, but I have not time to read up on the mailing list or drafts yet… feel free to add to the list.

My thinking at the moment is that we should at least have the BOF. We can tell more after the meeting. Thoughts? Comments?

Ian Jacobs distributed a mail about planned W3C working groups:

Today W3C Advisory Committee Representatives received a Proposal to revise the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity [0] (see the W3C Process Document description of Activity Proposals [1]). This proposal includes a draft charter for the  Device APIs and Policy Working Group: http://www.w3.org/2009/05/DeviceAPICharter

As part of ensuring that the community is aware of proposed work at W3C, this draft charter is public during the Advisory Committee review period.

W3C invites public comments through 2009-06-25 on the proposed charter. Please send comments to public-new-work@w3.org, which has a public archive: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-new-work/

Other than comments sent in formal responses by W3C Advisory Committee Representatives, W3C cannot guarantee a response to comments. If you work for a W3C Member [2], please coordinate your comments with your Advisory Committee Representative. For example, you may wish to make public comments via this list and have your Advisory Committee Representative refer to it from his or her formal review comments.

If you should have any questions or need further information, please contact Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, Mobile Web Initiative Activity Lead <dom@w3.org>.

[0] http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/
[1]
http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/activities#ActivityCreation
[2] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List