Emergency services in IMS

Abstract

There is an increasing demand of multimedia and location aware services when an accurate and immediate response is needed, for example in the case of emergency services. In parallel, the technology has evolved from Circuit Switch (CS) to Packet Switch (PS) networks requiring backwards compatibility. As a result the emergency services support for NGNs, in particular for IMS, is being standardized by 3GPP, NENA, ETSI. In this paper we present architecture for Emergency Services support in IMS, starting from the one from 3GPP. We have implemented this architecture as the Emergency Branch of the opensource project Open IMS Core. The available methods for personalizing the testbed and validation scenarios are described here. More important, the management of resource allocation and prioritization of emergency calls is also discussed in the context of the emerging EPC. © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2011.