Eurescom mess@ge home

Public Safety and ICT

Threats to public safety are abundant - they include natural disasters, terrorist attacks and accidents in plants. Information and communication technologies can help avoid incidents or reduce their impact. This issue provides an overview on the current status of public safety and ICT and highlights some advanced ICT solutions to public-safety challenges.

Public Safety and ICT - Preventing incidents
and minimizing their impacts
Every year, natural or man-made disasters take many lives and cause severe damage. After disaster has struck we ask ourselves, whether anything could have been done in order to avoid the incident or to reduce its impact. ICT already plays a significant role in this. Eurescom mess@ge editor Uwe Herzog explains what is done in this area in Europe and what the unused potential ICT has in improving public safety.

Wireless Sensor Networks for Homeland Security
Homeland security and, more specifically, perimeter/area surveillance for intrusion detection is one of the most promising Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications. FP6 project UbiSec&Sens developed a demonstrator of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) for Homeland Security, which is presented in this article by Augusto Casaca and Antonio Grilo from INOV, Portugal.

DeHiGate - Deployable High-Capacity Gateway
for emergency services
The Deployable High Capacity Gateway has been developed in the Celtic DeHiGate project to give emergency services new and innovative communications capabilities in emergency operations. It adds a deployable wireless network capability to the emergency network infrastructures recently deployed in many European nations. Bjørn Rossow from Thales Norway gives an overview on DeHiGate.

ICT challenges in emergency management -
Interview with TIEMS President Kåre Harald Drager
ICT has profoundly changed public safety and particularly emergency management. Eurescom mess@ge editor-in-chief Milon Gupta talked to Kåre Harald Drager, an internationally renowned expert in this field, about the future of ICT and emergency management.

Public safety networks of the future -
Celtic projects HNPS and FT PSC
To provide a new type of service for public safety, such as video and transmission of large images, safety radio networks have to support broadband communications. Furthermore, To provide a resilient and reliable communication in the areas where communication infrastructure does not exist or had been destroyed, a deployable ad-hoc communication system has to be available. Read the report by Harold Linke and Adrian Boukalov about Celtic projects Heterogeneous Network for Public Safety (HNPS) and Federated Testbed for Public Safety Communication (FT PSC), which are addressing these issues, focusing on the future public safety communication networks integration.

THE KENNEDY PERSPECTIVE

“Futures” and “Internets”
Eurescom director David Kennedy presents his view on the Future Internet and how to shape it. He postulates a service-aware network with network aware services and a management system to guarantee the quality purchased.

VIEWPOINT

Why there is no such thing as “green ICT”

"Green ICT” has become a fashionable term. In his opinion article Eurescom mess@ge editor Anastasius Gavras argues that the definition of “green ICT” is so far quite immature definition, when it comes to environmental sustainability of the ICT sector.

IN FOCUS

ISI European Technology Platform – The Integral Satcom Initiative
Satellite communications (Satcom) represent a very important part of the space industry. ISI (Integral Satcom Initiative) is the European Technology Platform that gathers all the Stakeholders of the European satellite communications sector. ISI chairman Vincenzo Fogliati from Telespazio gives an overview on ISI's activities with special focus on ISI's proposal for an advanced European satellite communication system.

PROJECT REPORTS

The potential of P2P-SIP architecture in telecoms -
Results from Eurescom Study P1755
One of the current challenges of VoIP (Voice over IP) architectures is to build lightweight architectures that meet service providers' requirements such as legal interception and emergency calls. Mohamed Boucadair Orange Labs presents an overview of the results of a Eurescom study on P2P-SIP architectures that addressed these challenges.

Stone-age brains in the information age
Computers, the Internet and mobile communication have increased our cognitive load, causing sometimes symptoms like infostress and attention deficit trait. This prompted Eurescom mess@ge editor-in-chief Milon Gupta to ask, whether it is now time to consider updating our wetware in order to cope with the demands of soft- and hardware. Read in this article, which answers he found.