BUILDING MOBILE EMERGENCY ANNOUNCEMENT SYSTEMS IN 3G NETWORKS

摘要

The Indian Ocean tsunami tragedy again highlighted the need for every region to have emergency announcement (EA) systems. Besides the traditional EA systems (sirens, radio, television), mobile emergency announcement (MEA) systems -EA systems where the EAs are sent e.g. to mobile phones - are currently being designed and tested; yet there are no comprehensive lists of criteria for designing or evaluating MEA systems. In this paper we first propose a comprehensive set of requirements for MEA systems, based on both a literature summary and our own additional analysis. We then analyze how to meet these requirements in third generation wireless communication (3G) systems. We found that 3G technology is relatively close to the requirements, but some essential additions to 3G functionality are needed if 3G systems are to be used for MEAs.