Emergency Telecommunication Service (ETS)[RFC 4190]

Telephony Signaling when used in Internet-based telephony services in addition to the general requirements specified in RFC 3689 needs to support a number of additional requirements RFC 3690:

Telephony signaling applications (used with Internet-based telephony)
must be able to carry labels.
The labels must be extensible - to support various types and numbers of labels.
These labels should have a mapping to the various emergency related labels/markings used in other telephony based networks, e.g., PSTN
- To ensure that a call placed over a hybrid infrastructure (i.e., PSTN+Internet) can carry the labels end-to-end with appropriate translation at PSTN/Internet boundaries.
- Only authorized users or operators should be able to create non-ordinary Labels (i.e., labels that may alter the default best effort service).
- Labels should be associated with mechanisms to providing strong end-to-end integrity
- Operators should have the capability of authenticating the label

Slide Notes

K. Carlberg, I. Brown, and C. Beard, “Framework for Supporting Emergency Telecommunications Service (ETS) in IP Telephony”, IETF, RFC 4190, November 2005 ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc4190.txt

K. Carlberg and R. Atkinson, “General Requirements for Emergency Telecommunication Service (ETS)”, IETF RFC 3689, February 2004 ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3689.txt

K. Carlberg and R. Atkinson, “IP Telephony Requirements for Emergency Telecommunication Service (ETS)”, IETF RFC 3690, February 2004 ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3690.txt

Transcript

[slide433] So, emergency services. In most countries, there's a facility so that we can attach labels to calls, indicating that they're urgent, that they're important, either for national security reasons, civil defense reasons, et cetera. So, the result is, if all the circuits are busy, what happens to other calls? They get dropped, so that this high-priority call can be made. How do we incorporate that into VoIP? It means we need to have labels on our packets that say, this is an important packet, take care of it, versus these other packets, which, if things are bad, you can drop them. The labels have to be extensible, the labels have to have appropriate markings, and the infrastructure has to be able to deal with them, and only authorized users or operators should be able to create these high-priority labels.