Final Report Summary - GERYON (Next generation technology independent interoperability of emergency services)
Executive Summary:
GERYON is a R&D project of the call FP7-SEC-2011-1 of the 7th Framework Programme. It proposes the integration of the communication networks used by emergency –ambulances, fire brigades, civil protection teams– and safety (PMRs) management bodies with new generation telephone networks (4G, LTE). Thus, the multimedia capabilities of the new smartphones can be exploited with secure communication services provided by traditional security networks. These services include mechanisms for Push to Talk, group calls, location of terminals, etc.
The project work plan defined a series of design and implementation work packages aimed at developing a non-commercial demonstrator prototype, whose functionalities would be evaluated at the end of the Project on an international testbed.
At the end of the Project all its objectives have been successfully fulfilled, resulting in a fully working IMS compatible ecosystem capable of providing today PMR grade communications while paving the way for future profesional LTE networks.
Project Context and Objectives:
At the beginning of 2011 the idea of using VoIP technologies for providing Mission Critical communication services was by no means shared among the public safety community. In fact, there was a significant uncertainty about the near future evolution of classical PMR solutions due to spectrum scarcity, digital dividend issues and economic crisis. This being an environment with huge security, resilience and privacy requirements, relying on general-purpose infrastructures was extremely controversial, if not directly neglected by a vast majority. In fact, most emergency bodies were used to build and manage their own private communications infrastructure and interoperability had never been in the top list of priorities.
The need for enhanced emergency services, the economical crisis, unacceptable market entry barriers and the growing obsolescence of traditional PMRs when compared with nowadays broadband wireless broadband networks (and devices) resulted in a perfect storm that led to a path shift of the whole industry to IP technologies.
At that very initial stage, GERYON proposed facing this situation by seizing the existing window of opportunity due to the convergence of the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) and the imminent deployment of commercial LTE networks.
In order to do so, GERYON approach comprised an innovative emergency inter-networking system capable of connecting existing first responder communication systems and enabling the integration of next generation mobile networks by defining technology independent standardized interfaces and autonomic configuration and adaptation techniques under the umbrella of IMS, 3GPP’s suite of standards. Therefore, GERYON aimed at unifying common technical and operational logic of first responder communications networks in a technology independent manner.
Such unification would offload interconnection gateways from duplicated technology dependent details by providing a neutral interconnection interface. Proposed system would therefore ensure seamless operation regardless the access technology and take advantage of coverage and responsiveness of existing PMRs and broadband data services of 4G networks.
GERYON’s main objectives aimed at demonstrating both classical (i.e. PTT, MTP and preemptive calls) and enhanced emergency services (i.e. multimedia streaming and data services) over an across-frontier testbed. Furthermore, due to its capability for including general purpose IMS terminals and GERYON enhanced ones, the adoption of GERYON allows an easy access to first responder networks to different groups of users that will take advantage of enhanced services such as the Red Button over general purpose devices.
On February 22, 2012, U.S. President Obama signed into law the “Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012,” which included provisions to fund and govern a Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network in the U.S. that would be using LTE as the underlying radio technology and bring $7bn. budget for initial deployments and tests. Then, US NPSBN (first) and UK’s ESMCP crossroads and widely recognized adoption of LTE as next generation public safety network technology changed everything, aligning the whole market with the otherwise humble R&D GERYON project and putting project outcomes at the same level that biggest telcos’ and military huge companies’ proposals.
In order to pursue this ambitious goal the specific objectives of the project were:
• Objective 1: To design, develop and demonstrate a fully operational IMS-driven emergency services management platform.
• Objective 2: To design and develop an innovative GERYON Enhanced Management System (GEMS) and related MGW and SGW nodes.
• Objective 3: To research and develop advanced decision support logic for a technology agnostic management of emergency communications.
• Objective 4: To design a reference gateway (GEGW) and develop a specific GEGW supporting the integration of TETRA users into IMS.
• Objective 5: To design and develop a GERYON compatible software client which will allow using a subset of GERYON services through non-GERYON access networks.
• Objective 6: To develop, evaluate and demonstrate enhanced emergency services support in 4G LTE network.
• Objective 7: To use and disseminate knowledge widely, enabling the standardization and the commercial exploitation of the project outcomes.
• Objective 8: To manage and coordinate project activities to enable the Consortium to achieve its goals and objectives on time and within budget.
A detailed description of these high level objectives will be described in the following sections.
O1: Fully operational IMS-driven emergency services management platform
This Objective comprised building a common GERYON network infrastructure based on the IMS technology, including the different IMS domains, User profiles, the central GEMS node, the different interfaces among core and support nodes:
• Design and deploy IMS core components and their relations. On top of them, IMS services (single/group calls, location services, identity management, security, etc.) and functions to support them (call routing, XDMS servers, etc.) (O1.1).
• The definition of user profiles involves identifying the information to be included and how it will be organized and linked together. In order to support seamless integration with different IMS cores without modification, the use of IMS user profiles was from the very beginning crucial for defining the GERYON overall architecture and some of the internal modules of the GEMS (O1.2).
• Carefully analyse and design services mainly used in the PMR world (such as GroupCall, Push-To-Talk, Location or Presence Services), in order to export them to the IMS technology when not available in general purpose IMS stacks (O1.3).
• Contribute to the promotion of the GERYON project among standardisation bodies and industry fora from different fields (such as telecommunication, multimedia, PMR or mobile operators) offering a practical view gained during integration activities (O1.4).
O2: GERYON Enhanced Management System (GEMS) and related MGW and SGW design and development
O2 included the design and deployment of a technology agnostic GERYON Enhanced Management System (GEMS) comprising Identity Management, Security, Signalling, Transcoding and Enhanced Emergency Services functionalities, so that a seamless communication between GERYON users from different access technologies is guaranteed. Additionally, Security and Transcoding operations will be performed in two separate nodes: SGW (Security Gateway) and MGW (Media Gateway), allowing the integration of GERYON compliant third party devices.
The fulfilment of the design and deployment of GEMS and SGW/MGW will comprise the following subojectives:
• Bring together all technical and non technical (organisational) requirements in order to define the functionality of the GEMS module. Consequently, it will entail an analysis on end user preferences regarding the services to be provided and the definition of technical requirements for IMS compatibility (O2.1).
• Fully define GEMS and its internal modules (RCM, SMM, TMM, ESMM and TAMS), their interfaces and the data to be interchanged, so that it matches the defined use cases using IMS compliant mechanisms (O2.2).
• Specificy and integrate the GEMS node into the IMS architecture, so that it can be easily exported to commercial scenarios in order to facilitate a commercial exploitation of its modules (O2.3).
• Design and development of the key components of the GEMS system including TAMS and Control Room interface, including the TAMS module and a basic control room for demonstration purposes. The call controlling capability, which will enable the initiation, modification and termination of sessions, will be a common feature for all modules and TAMS will be in charge of controlling its logic. GEMS modules perform the following actions: resource management (RCM), enhanced service management (ESMM), transcoding/multimedia management (TMM) and security management (SMM) (O2.4).
• Design and development of the GMGW, the module in charge of the transcoding procedures so that terminals using different codecs can communicate through the GERYON platform. Since the MGW must interact with the GEMS, it must also implement an IMS interface (O2.5).
• Design and development of the GSGW, the module in charge module is responsible for enabling a secure communication between GERYON users using different security mechanisms, carrying out the adequate cross-ciphering and key management procedures. It must also have an IMS compatible interface to communicate with GEMS. (O2.6).
• Specify the interfaces of the management modules in the GEMS with the TD-EGS, MGW and SGW, including the definition of the high level information interchanged between the GEMS modules and external GERYON modules (TD-EGS, MGW and SGW) (O2.7)
O3: TAMS logic research and development
The TAMS module represents the intelligence of the GERYON system and carries out all decision-making and adaptation control processes so as to meet service requirements regarding the availability of resources. Since GERYON connects heterogeneous radio systems, TAMS central coordination of these resources is essential. The research activities will be focused on determining how the resource control mechanisms affect the network performance and how this also has its effect on users’ perception at the same time. The whole target is broken down into the following second level objectives:
• Design and implement a centralized repository covering organisations, user groups, device characteristics, priorities, etc.), so that it can perform its decision tasks adequately (O3.1).
• Research the interactions with the different TD-EGS considered by defining the communication regarding flow diagrams and messages that will be interchanged between GEMS and all different TD-EGS nodes that take part in GERYON (O3.2).
• Research the effects of alternative communication settings into end users, since diverse communication conditions will have a strong effect on the quality end users receive in their terminals in critical situations, so that TAMS decision algorithms will have to choose the best settings for the conversations in these situation (O3.3).
• Orchestrate the fulfilment of grade of service requirements by proposing algorithms in charge of enabling the service requirements based on different service characteristics and resource availability, in order to provide PMR services while medium resources are correctly optimized (O3.4).
• To design and develop the internal interfaces between TAMS and the different management modules in order TAMS to obtain the information it needs (statistics, priorities, etc.) and to instruct the actions that must be performed (call dropping, codec selection, etc.) (O3.5).
O4: GEGW reference GW and TETRA specific pilot GEGW
This objective deals with the definition of the methods to translate the technology dependant data and call management functions to the IMS world. A general GEGW common to different PMR technologies and a specific GEGW for TETRA users will be implemented for demonstration purposes according to the following steps:
• Specify a reference GEGW in order to connect different networks to the GERYON infrastructure that includes an IMS compliant interface to communicate with GERYON modules. This subobjective also includes the design and development of internal modules and the definition of technology agnostic information to be interchanged (O4.1).
• Design and develop a particular GEGW for TETRA, with the purpose of testing the whole GERYON. Specific technology dependent modules in this gateway deal with TETRA user management, emergency service provision, transcoding and security functionalities (O4.2).
O5: GERYON clients
This Objective is focused on the design and development of GERYON terminals for both citizen and PMR agencies. These terminals will let them access GERYON emergency services.
• Specify client requirements and security limitations for GERYON terminals, whose features and security restrictions will differ depending on the users addressed (O5.1).
• Design and develop a software client codebase to support GERYON-related basic IMS emergency communications by extending a Android based general purpose IMS stacks with needed IMS features for providing GERYON services were not available (O5.2).
• Design and develop specific user interfaces to launch the emergency communications, such as the Red Button and PMR functionalities (O5.3).
• Design and develop client features to provide advanced feedback to GEMS (performance, Cell-ID, QoS, etc.). Sometimes this information will be available to the devices, but other times they will need the help of other modules, such as the TD-EGS (O5.3).
O6. Emergency services support in 4G LTE network.
GERYON emergency services will be exported to 4G LTE networks. Due to the poor current level of deployment of these networks a thorough analysis of the SoTA regarding emergency services in LTE must be performed. Regarding the design, a specific module called TD-EGS will be in charge of providing LTE users connectivity to GERYON services.
• Review standardisation activities related to LTE emergency communications (O6.1)
• Specificy IMS-driven LTE emergency communications in order some features (QoS, prioritization, identities, etc.) to be correctly transferred from the LTE world to IMS (O6.2).
• Design and develop a LTE TD-EGS in order to provide GEMS with network specific information in order to assure LTE-GERYON compatibility including group management, network resources allocation and location and network performance information provision (O6.3).
• Test and validate all proposed IMS-driven LTE emergency services (O6.4)
O7: Dissemination of the project outcomes
One of the main goals of the GERYON project is to spread the knowledge acquired during its development, to contribute to the standardization of its features and to enable a commercial exploitation of its results. These dissemination activities are addressed to both the general public and to expert industry and standardization fora including:
• Develop and maintain GERYON website in order to gather the latest important information of the GERYON project (O7.1).
• Disseminate project to both general public and scientific community with appropriated tools including i.e. press releases (adequate for the general public) to scientific publications in journals or conferences (O7.2).
• Define a business plan for the commercial exploitation of the project’s results (O7.3).
• Contribute to standardisation activities and fora, ranging from traditional telcos to PMR equipment distributors (O7.4).
O8: Efficient Project management and coordination
This Objective comprises the evaluation of partners’ performance in order to foresee possible problems and to be able to apply the necessary corrective measures in time. Other activities are related with the management of communication among consortium members and also with external agents by:
• Providing an effective project management framework including a roadmap to state specific low level milestones and deliverable formats and control activities (i.e. meetings) (O8.1).
• Regularly reviewing and assessing of the partners’ performance, by using Quarterly Management Reports (QMRs) two Intermediate Progress Reports to help in the supervision of financial issues and partners’ performance (O8.2).
Project Results:
In order to make it easier for the reader to assess the results according to the original objectives a table compiling a summary of the per-objective related activities has been included in the Publishable Summary pdf file uploaded to the Participant Portal.
The following sections will cover the results per objective.
* Fully operational IMS-driven emergency services management platform (O1)
** Design and development of the modules of the GEMS and its interfaces with both existing IMS infrastructure and GERYON elements (O1.1)
GERYON proposes an ecosystem where all the involved GERYON players can interoperate based on a common technology at higher layers, while keeping their current technologies for intra-organisation operations at lower layers. Figure 2 illustrates the general architecture for GERYON interoperable ecosystem, and identifies the specific elements that are needed in order to enable the integration of the different GERYON players, including multiple Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs), call centres responsible for answering calls to an emergency telephone number for police, fire station, ambulance services etc.
Therefore, the GERYON architectural concept relies on a hierarchical IMS structure, where two IMS (native or enabled by GEGW) domains that belong to different emergency organizations are controlled by the GEMS, which operates at another independent IMS domain (the GERYON domain). This design is imposed by the GERYON organisational requirements in order to allow any two organizations to interoperate without further configuration / agreements between them.
Once the GERYON overall system approach was determined, the identification and specifications of all the IMS standardised elements and procedures (covered in Sections 4 and 5 of D2.2.) was carried out. All this analysis leaded to the architecture depicted in Figure 2 (in the attached Publishable Summary pdf file) and reported in D2.2. Each one of GERYON nodes’ characteristics was comprehensively described:
• The GERYON Enhanced Management System (GEMS), the central management node of GERYON ecosystem, is located in the GERYON IMS domain and comprises the management logic for all GERYON emergency services.
• GERYON Media Gateway (GERYON MGW or GMGW), located also within the GERYON IMS domain is specified as the specialised support gateway that performs media transcoding operations if required in a media session as requested by GEMS.
GERYON Security Gateway (GERYON SGW or GSGW), located within the GERYON IMS domain is specified as the specialized support gateway that performs cross-ciphering operations at media level if required in a media session as requested by GEMS. Since different emergency organisations may implement different encryption mechanisms for the media data, cross-ciphering within the GERYON domain may be necessary. GSGW interfaces with GEMS in a similar way to GMGW.
GERYON defines two functional elements acting as GERYON enablers at organisation level in order to ensure that the different organisations comply with GERYON requirements.
• The Technology Dependent Emergency GERYON Services (TD-EGS) is specified as the GERYON enabler for emergency organisations endowed with IMS-based network infrastructures for emergency communications. Although these organisations may be able to establish basic IMS sessions with GERYON IMS domain, specific support for some PMR-grade functionalities would differ between different deployments. Thus, TD-EGS is in charge of mapping the intra-organisation procedures to GERYON IMS domain compliant ones.
• The GERYON Enhanced GateWay (GEGW) is specified as the GERYON enabler for non-IMS emergency organisations, including traditional PMR organisations based e.g. on TETRA/TETRAPOL technologies. This reference gateway interconnects existing first responder PMR networks to the new IMS-based GERYON emergency inter-networking architecture, and in turn to the GERYON GEMS module.
GERYON terminals enable users to support direct access to GERYON basic and enhanced services regardless the access network and its IMS capabilities. GERYON terminals comprise i) a software client implementing traditional IMS signalling and ii) GERYON compliant operations, related to security, location and specific applications support.
Out of this architecture, the description of all the nodes was carried out resulting in:
• Specification of internal functional modules concerning GEMS, GEGW and TD-EGS. Identification of existing technologies and IMS-based functional elements.
• Specification of internal functional modules concerning GSGW and GMGW. Identification of existing technologies and IMS-based functional elements. Detection of a lack of support in 3GPP standards for GSGW features.
• Specified of IMS client terminals, referring to hardware and its application, to be used for emergency communication for demonstration purposes.
• Specification of internal functional modules concerning GEMS, GEGW and TD-EGS. Identification of existing technologies and IMS-based functional elements.
• Specification of internal functional modules concerning GSGW and GMGW. Identification of existing technologies and IMS-based functional elements. Detection of a lack of support in 3GPP standards for GSGW features.
Additionally for each one of the more than 20 basic, enhanced services, communication categories and use cases defined in D.2.2 , a comprehensive representation of standard compliant operation (together with flow diagram) was carried out and reported in D2.2. (see Figure 3 and Figure 4 in the attached Publishable Summary pdf file for a example of “category 3.1: Individual call between different technologies with compatible codecs and security parameters”).
Four different IMS core for 112-style emergency services have deployed and installed at NCSRD VM infrastructure (depicted on Figure in the publishable summary pdf file) and EHU premises. OpenIMSCore has been utilized as code base for the GERYON purposes and adapted to the needs of the GERYON multi-organization overall architecture.
For the IMS deployment needs of the project, the use of the open source IMS core (although later Kamailio was also tested) was initially decided, which is an open source implementation of the IMS which allows the configuration and the customization that may be needed for building the GERYON solution.
**Extension and enhancement of IMS user profiles (O1.2)
Finally, there was no need to extend IMS user profiles. Instead, the carefully chosen namespaces and Initial Filter Criteria and triggering points associated to each type of users considered in GERYON have allowed a seamless operation over un-tweaked Out-Of-The-Box IMS cores (see D2.2 D3.4 and specially D6.1 and D6.3 for detailed configuration mechanisms and resulting traces).
Design and development of currently unsupported IMS services in order to provide ** PMR-grade emergency services (O1.3)
GERYON GEMS implements specific control logic in combination with standard IMS services in order to provide enhanced PMR-level services. Therefore, in addition to GEMS service enablers, three additional specific Group call, Push-to-talk and Group Messaging Application Servers deployed at GERYON domain will handle service specific operations using existing IMS interfaces and procedures:
These ASs were fully designed and developed due to lack of available open implementations or lack of specific GERYON-compatible functionalities, so they were implemented either from scratch or based on third-party software.
The Group Call Application Server, also commonly denoted as Conference Server in IMS, is devoted to handling the signalling and media planes for multiparty full-duplex audio calls. Therefore, all the session establishment procedures can be implemented with IMS SIP messages. The resulting media plane is depicted in Figure 6 in the publishable summary pdf file. In the case of GERYON, the audio multiparty calls are managed by GEMS in 3PCC mode, which is in charge of initiating the IMS procedures coordinating each endpoint with the Group Call AS. Thus, the GERYON Group Call AS needs to support specific 3PCC operations, such as the reception of empty SDP messages in the initial INVITE.
The Push-to-Talk (PTT) or Push-to-Talk over Cellular (PoC) Application Server (AS) is devoted to handling the signalling and media planes for one-to-one (point-to-point) and one-to-many (point-to-multipoint) one-way audio calls. To achieve this, the PTT AS is in charge of 1) managing the floor control between two or multiple PTT Clients participating in a PTT call session, and 2) receiving the RTP flows that come from the PTT Client which has taken the floor (right to talk) and distributing them to the other parties.
Finally, the Group Messaging Application Server makes use of MSRP to exchange multimedia messages among a group of users. An example of its overall signalling mechanisms is depicted in the Figure 7 in the publishable summary pdf file.
The development of the PMR grade services supporting IMS nodes was carried out in WP3 and reported in D3.4. As all the other nodes, they were integrated during WP6 and final e2e results were collected in D6.1 and D6.3.
The Group Call Application Server has been implemented using SEMS www.iptel.org/sems in the same way as GEMS. It has been developed as a SEMS plug-in that will make use of core SEMS classes to offer its functionalities. As an example, Figure 8 in the publishable summary pdf file shows a network trace of an actual session involving GEMS and the Group Call AS. The figure focuses on the signalling plane messages between both nodes through the core IMS nodes.
In the case of GERYON, the PTT calls are enabled by GEMS and mainly managed by the GERYON PTT AS playing the Controlling PoC Server function as specified by OMA and presented in the D3.2 Section 3.2.5.i.b. The implementation reference architecture is depicted in the Figure 9. The PTT AS is driven by the Controlling Server Core which manages all the others functions of the server. This server core relies on the SIP User Agent for session establishment/initiation negotiation. It also relies on the TBCP Manager and the underlying RTCP Encoder/Decoder for the floor control management and RTCP commands sending/receiving. The RTP Streamer/Receiver and the One-Way Conference Manager are used by the server core for the audio data dispatching. The later also accesses to the external XDMS Server by means of the XCAP Client and its related Query Manager modules. The core server is started by the Server Main module after reading the configuration parameters parsed at start-up by the ArgParser module.
The Group Messaging application Server (GMS) is an IMS Application Server that handles all the group messaging functions. It works without needing interaction from the users and it communicates with the S-CSCF module. GMS requires a Linux OS with python 2.7 installed.
* GERYON Enhanced Management System (GEMS) and related MGW and SGW design and development (O2)
** Collection of the requirements to be fulfilled by GEMS (O2.1)
This objective was particularly addressed by WP2 and comprised both technical and non technical requirements gathering. In particular, and firstly, D2.1 “Emergency communications: current state and users' requirements" -M6-, included all the requirements for GERYON system development, from the perspective of both the end users’ needs and the technological evolution and capabilities. Therefore, the work was focused on the user requirements definition based on data collected by primary research and more specifically by surveys/questionnaires to professional PMR end-users (e.g. policemen, firefighters etc.).
The results of this study ensured that the GERYON project objectives and specifications were in line with the current state of the emergency communications world. After this analysis, an interaction phase with GERYON end users was carried out in order to fetch a detailed view of what the possible GERYON users require for their daily operations. The results of this phase were used for the detailed specification and design of the overall GERYON solution for interoperability (collected in D2.1 see a example of the results in Table 2 in the publishable summary pdf file).
Regarding End Users requirements gathering stage:
• End user specific material was edited and translated into Spanish/Basque, English and Greek (some examples are shown in Annex 1 of D2.1).
• Several meetings were arranged at the beginning of the project (and other, i.e. Alava Red Cross, during the implementation stage), as well as telephone interviews and e-mailing interactions with different end users were carried out; a web page for gathering survey results in UK was also deployed (https://www.cscan.org/surveys/index.php?sid=44559&lang=en).
• 35 surveys were conducted with End Users from 3 different countries (Spain, UK, Greece). A specific area (user forum) in the website was enabled for interacting with End Users (upload of project description material, http://www.sec-geryon.eu/sec_geryon_forum/index.php).
• Statistics analysis of users’ preferences depending on their background was carried out (see Annex 2 of D2.1 for more detailed information)
Regarding the Technical Requirements gathering, the following ones are the more relevant results (most of them also collected in Section 4 and Annexes 3,4 and 5 of D2.1):
• Comprehensive analysis of current SoTA of emergency communications in LTE/IMS/TETRA, covering more than 200 technical specifications, standards and references (see Figure 11 in the publishable summary pdf file).
• Overall description of LTE, IMS and TETRA technologies from the point of view of emergency communications.
• LTE and TETRA state of the art thorough investigation and current and future emergency-related capabilities understanding.
• IMS state of the art: Available implementations and programming frameworks analysis. IMS-based emergency communications analysis, for both 112 and PMR grade communications.
• Overview of current state of commercial / business emergency solutions: novel solutions developed, technology-specific evolutions, hybrid solutions adopted, etc.
• Specific comparison of different aspects of emergency communication. This comparison has become a high value hands-on-guide for researcher and technicians with State-of-the-Art description of key similarities and difference among analysed technologies.
** Definition and specification of GEMS (O2.2)
GEMS is the central management entity of GERYON and from an operational perspective it is defined to operate as a 3rd Party Call Controller (3PCC) that uses two main modes of operation based on B2BUA, Routeing and Initiating B2BUA. Such element is introduced within the IMS architecture as an Application Server defined both in 3GPP TS 23.228 and in more detail in TS 23.218. All these specifications and requirements have been taken into consideration in order to define the GEMS ESMM, which is made up of specialised enabler modules with scope to enhance the IMS standardised emergency ASs and services in a network-controlled fashion.
As a result, from a service-level standpoint GEMS is split into the following modules:
• GEMS/TAMS is defined as the basic call controller that receives all the originating SIP messages aimed at the creation of an IMS communication. GEMS/TAMS acts as a routeing B2BUA and implements all the necessary functionalities in order to ensure the correct processing and forwarding of the SIP dialog.
• GEMS/ESMM is defined as a set of distributed modules, which consists of the specialised service enablers (one for each service) that provide additional service logic to the standardised IMS procedures and ASs in order to allow the provision of GERYON services.
• The Security Management Module (SMM) is responsible for handling the technology independent security associations and granting the privacy and integrity of multimedia flows. If end users do not share common ciphering mechanisms, the final ciphering/deciphering operations is carried out in the GSGW (using the IMS Back-to-Back User Agent -B2BUA- paradigm) ensuring interoperability between different end user terminals including legacy PMR ones.
• The Transcoding/multimedia Management Module (TMM) is responsible for handling the compatibility of multimedia flows in terms of encoding, by launching the GMGW operation if required. GEMS/TAMS implements the decision-making logic regarding the best combination of voice/multimedia codecs at session setup and during service lifetime. If required by TAMS, TMM will launch the specialised transcoding of multimedia content in the centralised operation mode through the GMGW (using the IMS B2BUA paradigm), ensuring interoperability between any possible end user terminals including legacy PMR ones.
The use of 3PCC for transcoding purposes is defined as well in TS 23.228 (section 5.14 Annex P) and TS 23.218 (section 8.1.4 and Annex B.2.3). Those standards show how a 3PCC AS is able to configure a MRFC node in order to derive a media flow from non-compatible endpoints. These standards will be the base of the GEMS TAMS, TMM and SMM module interaction for the case that real time codec and security adaptation is needed.
Finally, the use of the 3PCC approach for managing interdomain QoS at signalling plane has not been addressed by 3GPP. Thus, GEMS RCM function will follow a similar operation to the previous 3PCC procedures, although its specific operation will be further analysed.
** Specification and integration of the GEMS node into the IMS architecture (O2.3)
The specification of GEMS in terms of IMS procedures follows the guidelines and standards defined in the previous subsection according to the GERYON overall IMS ecosystem. Regarding integration, being the central GERYON node GEMS has been included in nearly all the designed IoT activities during WP6 (check D6.1 and D6.3 for reference).
Figure 12 in the publishable summary pdf file shows the typical outcome of one of such test after integration activities. Note that the figure is automatically generated out of actual network traces, demonstrating therefore that the SEMS based GEMS prototype is capable of interacting with all the IMS cores. In the example a IMS (LTE) user calls a TETRA user and GEMS is responsible for carrying out the proper identity mapping and B2BUA signalling.
Design and development of the key components of the GEMS system including ** TAMS and control room interface (O2.4)
GEMS prototype is built up on top of SEMS version 1.4.2 which is a media and application server for SIP based communications. Therefore, additional features within GEMS have been developed as SEMS plug-ins that can be invoked dynamically (using the built-in dynamic interface API called AmDynInvoke) by the main application or other existing modules. These plug-ins offer specific APIs that enable the invocation of their functionalities to other modules.
Moreover, in order to provide an external interface for the access and control of the current status of the server, the built-in XMLRPC module in SEMS permits to easily export the APIs of the different plug-ins via XMLRPC when used as a XMLRPC server. Additionally, it can be used as a XMLRPC client to execute functions residing in external modules to SEMS. This feature enables for example the visualization of the current active sessions within GERYON through a web interface.
See Figure 13 in the publishable summary pdf file (and GERYON D3.4) for a detailed architecture of the GEMS technological design.
A built from scratch GEMS prototype with all the GERYON requirements has been developed (based on aforementioned SEMS open source SIP B2BUA platform), deployed, integrated and tested. The myriad of network traces and evidences of performance in different deliverables and network traces uploaded to GERYON private area demonstrate the achieved performance level.
The GERYON mobile control room is based on Android platform and provides a Call Center capable of managing many organizations and users. The core module of the GERYON control room is a Listener Service, which concentrates the SIP messages from the call-related IMS signaling, the MSRP messages for the chat related content and finally the Presence messages from the XDMS and Presence server of the IMS. The Listener service interacts with the GERYON control room GUI either in standby or active mode, which in turn further manages the calls, the messages, the map or the group by the user interaction.
A prototype implementation of the GERYON Control Room has been developed and is currently available as open source project https://code.google.com/p/cc4ims/ .
The GERYON mobile Control Room implementation uses the Doubango open source framework for reassuring compatibility with IMS/SIP functions. For the mobility purposes of the GERYON Control Room, the Android 4.1.2 and Google Maps v2 for Android have been utilized, providing a lightweight implementation. The prototype is fully operational and was demonstrated in different GERYON days and final technical videos, supporting: Login Screen for registering the Control Room operator to IMS, Call Center Screen, location and static/dynamic group calling capabilities.
**Design and development of the GMGW (O2.5)
The GERYON Media Gateway GMGW reference architecture is depicted in the Figure 16. The GMGW is driven by the SIP User Agent that represents the main entry point. The GMGW provides its transcoding capabilities information and instantiates an effective media transcoding session when it receives respectively a SIP INVITE and the related ReINVITE messages from a client (GEMS/GSGW). The Session Manager component creates media transcoding session, which involves several components such as the media Transcoder (RTP transcoding), the Transcoding Engine (control of several Transcoders) and the Monitor, which monitors the session resources and sends the measured data to a Resource Manager in order to allow transcoding related resource allocation and Admission Control (AC).
The other GMGW Service Manager, Profile Manager and Media Gateway Manager components are respectively for the AC, the client rights access and capabilities checking, and the resource availability and transcoding management. More details are provided in the following subsections.
GMGW proof of concept has been completely developed and tested including:
• Implementation of a prototype GMGW structure
• Implementation of the SIP UA for interfacing with GEMS/TMM
o Session initialization (capabilities retrieving)
o Session media capabilities negotiation: based on SIP/SDP offer & answer
• Media transcoding from G.711 to AMR codecs
** Design and development of the SGW (O2.6)
The GSGW functional design and overall procedures to interact with the rest of GERYON elements have been completed. Figure 17 in the publishable summary pdf file shows the block design and, more importantly, a detailed zoom of the procedures involved in cross-ciphering operations, how GEMS requests such operations through a SIP based interface via a dual SDP definition (to map future (S)RTP flows) and how the SGW and the MGW might interact in case additional clear text transcoding is needed. Both KMS and SDES based key exchange modes have been analysed together with e2e, e2ae, e2me interdomain alternatives in 3GPP’s TR 33.828.
According to the design of the GSGW, the Media Controller of the Signalling plane processing node is the interface of the GSGW to any media level transmissions; by utilising the media connection information (e.g. IP addresses and ciphering suites) that is initially provided by the Signalling Controller, the Media Controller can set up connections to provide ciphering interoperability for media security incompatible devices.
The GSGW has been implemented in an open source environment that utilises the version 12.04 TLS of the Ubuntu operating system as the development platform. In addition, a number of open source libraries, including libsocket, libsrtp and libpthread, were utilised for creating several core functionalities of the GSGW, such as, setting up a virtual communication channel between clients, securing the data that travels via the channel and creating concurrent channels for multiple conversations.
A screenshot of when the GEMS invites the GSGW to a call session is illustrated in Figure 18 in the publishable summary pdf file. In the figure, a number of INVITE messages have been sent by the GEMS to the GSGW, enabling the invocation of the GSGW to support a security incompatible media session.
Controller of the GSGW and the GEMS.
** Specify the interfaces of the management modules in the GEMS with the TD-EGS, MGW and SGW (O2.7)
As previously mentioned, all interfaces with GEMS are based on IMS compliant procedures. These have been already completely defined and detailed in D2.2 (check previous Figure 11 for IMS compliance), fully implemented along the project development stages in WP3-5 and demonstrated in WP6. Final demonstration videos, network traces and resulting flow diagrams validate the compliance of GERYON with the 3GPP’s TS.
* TAMS logic research and development (O3)
** Design and implementation of a centralized repository for keeping service requirements and related information (O3.1)
The general structure of information in GERYON XDMS based central repository has been defined together with the RLS/groups mapping mechanisms depicted in Figure 19. Specific details are included in Section 3 of D2.2.
** Research the interactions with the different TD-EGS considered (O3.2)
Following the GERYON approach to specify common interfaces and procedures for border GWs (native TD-EGS and GEGW/TD-EGS), the TAMS logic is fed with common data and interacts with different technologies in a similar way.
• The QoS signalling scheme is common.
• The PNA-driven status information is also shared, although LTE devices may report more detailed information such as battery and QoS status.
• The RTCP proxies in native TD-EGS upload QoS statistics and manages the priority-enabled calls following common procedures.
** Research the effects of alternative communication settings and the acceptance by end users (O3.3)
Toward the completion of this objective, different steps have been already carried out:
• Analysis of the service parameters to cope with the end users’ requirements. Although much literature exists in the area of multimedia services in different contexts, its application to wideband emergency services is limited yet. The available critical mission-oriented studies have been analysed, in order to define the basic service parameters for the GERYON system.
• Several research works have been carried out by different partners to identify the specific relationship of the relevant input parameters towards the overall Quality of Experience (QoE).
• From a general perspective, the audio/audio-visual quality and the energy consumption have been taken into account (see Figure 21 in the publishable summary pdf file). Both features are typically opposite, so trade-off approaches have been proposed.
** To orchestrate the fulfilment of grade of service requirements in a coordinated way (O3.4)
Three areas of decision making have been defined and researched:
TAMS Call Admission Control: When receiving new call establishment requests, TAMS processes the requests through a priority-enabled serving queue. The basic algorithms for implementing the queuing system have been researched, and several tests have been carried out to profile the behavior of the system in different service environments.
TAMS Session Logic: When serving a new session establishment request, TAMS implements the TAMS Session Logic where it proactively reassures the compatibility of the different endpoints at service level (examines if additional service logic needs to be invoked) and media level (codecs, media ciphering and inter-domain QoS signalling).
TAMS Decision Logic: This logic includes all the necessary algorithms to drive the consolidated (re)configuration of the active sessions in order to optimize the performance of the system. The design of this logic takes into account the relevant GERYON characteristics, such as the inter-domain approach (gathering of information from different domains), the configuration of the service parameters at session initialization and during the service lifetime (upon reception of specific QoS-related events).
The core behaviour of TAMS has been designed, identifying the inputs and outputs of the system (as overviewed in the figure 22 in the publishable summary pdf file).
Both quality (NQoS & QoE) and battery related research studies have been based on experimental data, and the proposed logic has been initially evaluated through simulations. D3.3 showed all the research and simulation activities carried out to provide the adaptation intelligence to the TAMS (see an example in Figure 23 in the pdf file).
** To design and develop the internal interfaces and data information flows between TAMS and the different management modules (O3.5)
TAMS use standardised SIP signalling with external management nodes and shared memory and XMLRPC API to exchange information with builtin modules. For the former, Figure 24 in the publishable summary pdf file illustrates the flow diagram of a session initialization, which includes the actions performed by TAMS. Before contacting the callee, some session pre-initialization processes must be carried out. First of all, TAMS interacts with SMM in order to retrieve the media-plane ciphering capabilities supported by GSGW [Step 1]. Then, it contacts TMM and requests the set of media codecs available in GMGW [Step 2]. Next, a verification of the resource availability estimation for both origin and destination networks is performed [Step 3]. This is done through RCM, which stores/handles the network-related SIP events retrieved from different networks in GERYON and can infer estimates on whether a new session with the requested capabilities can be established.
A new session will be inserted in the Active Session Table together with some valuable parameters, such as the session identity, the participants, the priority and/or the status. TAMS could set the status of the session to ‘In-Progress’, so as to indicate that the session establishment procedure has not completed. The data of the Active Session Table repository will be accessible by all sub-modules of GEMS.
Similarly During the Session Adaptation Request Process, TAMS will be in charge of deciding if active sessions have to be adapted or established sessions have to be dropped due to the reception of network-related SIP events. This process may be solicited internally from the TAMS Session Logic or by an external authorized entity (i.e. RCM module and Control Room). As illustrated in Figure 25, in the publishable summary pdf file the interface and operation is the same regardless the origin of the invocation.
Detailed information of depicted interfaces can be found in D3.2.
* GEGW reference GW and TETRA specific pilot GEGW (O4)
** Specification of a reference GEGW and required procedures to interoperate with the rest of IMS based GERYON components (O4.1)
The initial high level design of the reference GEGW considered 4 different TD modules responsible for transcoding, security, GERYON emergency services and identity management. Although these modules will depend on specific technology working modes (i.e. TETRA identity management) the external interfaces will have to deal with the complete GERYON ecosystem. The approach depicted in Figure 26 has been applied for the GEGW reference design and TETRA prototype design and development. Specific mapping to GERYON tasks is included (refer to D4.1-3 for insights of the actual composition of the TETRA GEGW design).
** Design and development of a particular GEGW for TETRA (O4.2)
A preliminary analysis of the reference GEGW showed that some core functionalities would not be technology dependant or, at least, they could be easily translated to multiple technologies. Upon this idea, embedded in the design of the TETRA prototype a technology independent core was designed, developed and tested. In particular the GEGW TD-EGS’s design has significantly advanced, far beyond initial expectations. This design involves different internal processes intercommunicated by TCP/IP sockets (in order to guarantee future scalability), implementation of GWCOMP multitechnology core language and different parsers to TETRA and SIP (see an excerpt in Figure 27 in the publishable summary pdf file).
All the designs of the GEGW implemented from scratch leading to the following figures:
Number of lines of code 175.000 lines
Number of VISIO diagrams Over 100 diagrams
Number of pages of design and internal specifications Over 1.000 pages
* GERYON clients (O5)
** Specification of client requirements and security limitations (O5.1)
The client requirements vary depending of the type of terminal and services they can access to. There are four types of terminals defined as to be developed in GERYON:
• GERYON terminal for “red button” users, which allows quick access to GERYON NG112 services and ensures the provision of basic location information.
• GERYON terminal for emergency professional users, which supports all the required application-level signalling for the set of GERYON PMR-grade services and ensures the provision of basic location information.
Apart from the overall 3GPP (and related IETF’s RFCs) specification the following ones were comprehensively analysed and reported in D2.2:
Standard Scope Purpose
RFC 3711 RTP/SAVP profile Security capabilities for media plane (end-to-end and SGW)
RFC 4568 Session Description Protocol (SDP) Security Capability Negotiation Use of SDES for media plane encryption (end-to-end and SGW)
RFC 5939 Session Description Protocol (SDP) Security Capability Negotiation
Crypto attribute (end-to-end and SGW)
RFC 6043 Session Description Protocol (SDP) Security Capability Negotiation Use of KMS for media plane encryption (end-to-end and SGW)
RFC 5027 Session Description Protocol (SDP) Security Capability Negotiation Use of security preconditions - not adopted by 3GPP (end-to-end and SGW)
RFC 4585 RTP/AVPF profile RTCP feeback (end-to-end, RCM, TD-EGS)
RFC 3605 Real Time Control Protocol (RTCP) attribute in Session Description Protocol (SDP) For RCM oriented feedback
RFC 3611 RTP Control Protocol Extended Reports (RTCP XR) For RCM oriented feedback
RFC 6035 SIP-based VoIP QoS feedback For RCM oriented feedback
RFC 4119 A Presence-based GEOPRIV Location Object Format Location notification to local (domain) presence server
RFC 5985 HELD: HTTP-based location provision, by value and by reference Possible alternative for TD-EGS and LRF nodes (LIS function)
RFC 5222 LOST: Location-to-Service Translation Protocol Possible alternative for LRF nodes (RDF function)
RFC 4412 SIP-based session-level prioritisation, including emergency organisations Use of "Resource-Priority" and "Accept-Resource-Priority" SIP headers for endpoints, TD-EGS, RCM
RFC 3725 Best practices for 3PCC operations Possible logic for GEMS operation
RFC 4117 Invocation of transcoding services from SIP-based 3PCC Possible interface between GEMS and MGW
** Design and development of GERYON sw client to support basic IMS communications (O5.2)
Among others, Android based open source IMSDroid IMS client was selected. Default parameters specific for GERYON were enabled such as presence parameters after porting the missing functionalities. The generic GERYON IMS LTE architecture was reported in D5.3 and is depicted in Figure 29 in the publishable summary pdf file.
The application layer of the architecture contains the functional modules for which GERYON basic and enhanced services are implemented. This layer is where the SIP and Media Stacks reside.
The SIP Stack is based on Doubango Framework in which there are 6 Stack states, DISCONNECTED. Figure 30 depicts the SIP Stack states which are deployed in NgnSipStack class.
The general GERYON client SW is denoted as GDroid. The Gdroid environment/initial implementation has been iteratively tested in different Android HW devices. The Figures 31-34 in the publishable summary pdf file illustrate the implemented/added features.
** Design and development of specific UI to launch the emergency communications (O5.3)
From the Gdroid implementation, three different client profiles have been implemented: Red-buttton, NGN112 and Professional profiles:
Additionally a specific version of the client for ambulances has been tailored in order to address End Users’ specific requirements and show how the designed ecosystem to provide allows the quick development of new enriched application.
* Emergency services support in 4G LTE network (O6)
**Review of standardisation activities related to LTE emergency communications (O6.1)
Different Technical Specifications and Technical Recommendations (TSs and TRs) by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) include specific references to emergency communications in LTE. A comprehensive and up to date SotA revision was carried out in order to collect latest “emergency-LTE” standardization efforts that might have an impact into GERYON approach. Moreover, the supervision of the 3GPP’s activity on LTE was maintained during the whole project as a part of WP7 standardisation activities. Therefore, the SotA was not only reported in D2.1 but also in related D7.2 and D7.4 (see for example an update included in D7.4 in Table 4 in the publishable summary pdf file).
** Specification of IMS-driven LTE emergency communications (O6.2)
Since, at the beginning of the project there were no commercial LTE networks available the following preliminary tasks were accomplished to specify LTE characteristics for GERYON emergency communications:
• An LTE emulated system (Aeroflex 7100 LTE Digital Radio Test Set) was integrated with an IMS pilot. Testing of LTE connectivity between an IMS client (at laptop) and IMS infrastructure as well as testing of the impact of different configuration parameters on the quality of emergency communications.
• Implementation of LTE testbed and conduction of initial trials for the verification of proper operation and familiarization with LTE technology (excluding emergency calls (VoIP), since they could not be supported by the pilot platform). Test cases and results are included in D5.1 (M12).
• Investigation of prerequisites/challenges, etc. related to the LTE site deployment in the context of GERYON.
** Design and development of LTE TD-EGS (O6.3)
In order to define the internal composition of the LTE TD-EGS the following activities were carried out, leading to the designed depicted in Figure 40 in the publishable summary pdf file.
• Identification of the LTE TD-EGS functional (TD-EGS, TI-SIP, TD-Logic), non-functional and installation requirements.
• Identification of key TD-EGS functionalities, including: the Presence Agent, the Location module, the Network status module, the QoS Agent and the MPTY Agent.
• Design of TD-EGS at elements'/SW modules' level, including: XML Database, Active Sessions Table, Presence Network Agent, Watchers, RTCP Proxy, CellID to Location, Session Management Module (SMM) (supporting conference group call and push-to-talk individual/group call), Identity Translation, QoS Assignment, Group Call Management (GCM) and Network Event Extraction (NEE).
• Analysis of the integration of TD-EGS into Open IMS Core and investigation of alternatives regarding the implementation of TD-EGS SIP call control and presence functions.
** Testing and validation of the proposed IMS-driven LTE emergency communications (O6.4)
The GERYON Basic and Enhanced Services have been deplgoyed over the GERYON testbed and validated from a technical and operational point of view.
GERYON Basic Services involve 4G-TETRA interoperability for different types of voice communications. The outcomes of the validation were reported in GERYON D6.1. GERYON Enhanced Services involve 4G-driven media-enriched emergency services. The outcomes of the validation were reported in GERYON D6.2.
All the resulting experimental traces have been uploaded to a unified web site:
http://www.sec-geryon.eu/protected_area/D6.1_callflow.php
http://www.sec-geryon.eu/protected_area/D62/D6.2_callflow.php
Additionally, some performance evaluation analysis over the GERYON testbed has been performed and reported in GERYON D6.3. Table 5 in the publishable summary pdf file illustrates some collected times obtained in group half duplex call (PoC) tests for the different connection technologies.
Potential Impact:
NOTE:
Due to the number of tables and summary figures the reader is strongly encouraged to refer to the attached pdf file for confortable review.
The socio-economical impact of the GERYON outcomes can be analyzed based on the main GERYON innovations.
The main innovation of the project resides in the solution provided for the integration of heterogeneous mission critical networks under a common IMS-based platform, using an all-IP approach for both data and control planes. In detail, the following innovations are expected to have an impact in the society.
GERYON innovation
The GERYON architecture is based on Open Standards. The whole GERYON solution is based on Open Standards, primarily on the 3GPP IMS architecture. In our opinion, this feature endows the GERYON solution with a competitive advantage over other proposed, IP-based solutions. In this sense, the GERYON solution could be easily adopted by the relevant SDOs.
◊ Together with the fact that the GERYON procedures are designed based on open standards, and specifically on IMS as the prevalent candidate for future 4G networks, we believe that GERYON will provide a good basis for future Public Safety communication systems interoperability.
◊ Additionally, the GERYON solution takes into account the IP-based next generation communication recommendations between citizens and first responders (e.g. NG112 / NG911). Solutions and procedures have been designed to interconnect both worlds in a secure and reliable scheme. The benefits of including multimedia material in the management of emergencies is recognized by all the stakeholders (vendors, operators, end users…). Similarly, an enhanced communication between citizens and authorities will undoubtedly benefit the society with a better response to emergency calls.
Although these facts are not directly associated to the GERYON project, GERYON served as a demonstration platform of these novel services over currently deployed networks.
More specific to the GERYON outcomes, the proposed interoperability framework where all the agents involved in emergency situations is a missing feature in the current design of next generation emergency networks. NG112/NG911 systems are being specified independently of NG Public Safety networks. This fact may compromise the correct interoperability of citizen-to-authority and authority -to-authority communications in the future.
GERYON has shown the benefits of a coordinated communications framework, and thus has been recognized by end users and involved stakeholders.
The GERYON architecture has been designed taking into account the organizational standpoint in order to solve the interoperability problems typically associated to this kind of emergency organizations. More specifically:
◊ The GERYON approach enables a third-party reliable organization to mediate the emergency communications between different professional organizations.
◊ GERYON facilitates the communications and interoperability among different networks, organizations and users employing different technologies, while assuring the individual self-control of each organization communications, without preventing each user group from offering its own communications services. The concept of third party mediation agency seems relevant in different scenarios, from small scale multi-organization regional/national public operators to large-scale international agencies for cross-frontier crisis management.
Currently, upon big emergency situations, responder organizations should have previously agreed and configured the way emergency communications happen. It is interesting to deploy such type of reliable intermediation agent that assures the interoperability without need for previous peer-to-peer agreements between all the organizations.
The concept has been presented in different forums (including ITU-T) with initial positive feedbacks.
At the same time, emergency end users pointed out the requirement to keep autonomy in the management of resources. In that sense, the GERYON “push model” assures a distributed self-management by each organization for a common orchestrated communication framework.
The GERYON architecture allows for scalable interoperability procedures.
◊ The GERYON solution specifies a series of standard-based common procedures (protocols and data sets) to communicate any emergency domain with the GERYON domain.
The Basic Services enable the provision of traditional emergency services in modern IP-based networks. The Emergency Services make it possible for the first responders to receive invaluable information (e.g. photos/videos from the incident, location of the person in need) in order to react with more efficiency.
◊ All these procedures are designed in a per-organization basis, with a scalable approach. This means that all the services can be provided over current technologies, while they are also ready for adoption by future technologies (e.g. Public Safety LTE) without any specific requirement of modifying the common inter-domain procedures. In the current situation, some stakeholders are pushing for a quick adoption of the new wave of 4G technologies for Public Safety while other well-established agents are more conservative.
The GERYON solution is presented and recognized as a good solution for the transient period, since interoperability and coexistence are implemented based on standard procedures that will probably be in line with the future standardisations and developments.
Therefore, GERYON will foster the adoption of these new 4G technologies for specific emergency services, at the same time that a smooth and scalable transition can be made, guaranteeing that the current investments are not lost in the future.
The GERYON solution moves the advanced communications management to the network:
◊ The GERYON core (GEMS) implements most of the complex multi-organization procedures in a 3PCC-driven approach.
◊ Standard and simple interfaces are provided to manage the GERYON services. The GERYON 3PCC management approach, jointly to the fact that GERYON core services can be run in a virtualized way in the network, enables easy to access interoperability communications.
Once the technical issues and protocol details are solved by the core system, third parties could use these interfaces to develop specialized management interfaces for different agents (e.g. Control Rooms, vehicle devices, etc.).
This would benefit the activity of new companies specialized in the media-enriched interfaces since complex technical details are hidden to them.
Table 6: GERYON socio-economical impact
Concerning the potential impact for GERYON partners, the compliance of GERYON solutions with existing LTE/TETRA and IMS/SIP standards and their adoption for emergency service provisioning/delivery are the strong points addressed by the consortium, and then helping for new business opportunities. GERYON’s potential business contributions to markets have been identified. The GERYON consortium partners have proposed several business cases and related exploitation strategies to push GERYON based solutions/services/products to markets.
The Mobile Network Operator Business Case
In the context of GERYON project various possible scenarios of GERYON or similar public safety systems/services provision have been explored. From these it has been deduced that the MNO’s role in the value chain can be summarized in the following candidate business models:
Model 1: A first responder (FR) entity or a private mobile radio communications operator (PMR) deploys a public safety LTE network. In this case, the role of the mobile network operator is undertaken by the FR entity or the PMR. The FR entity can be a municipality (as in the US initial deployments) deploying a local or metropolitan area network over which only public safety services and possibly services related to the FR entity activities are provided. The role of the mobile operator can be restricted in consulting services regarding the radio network deployment, and probably on the establishment of specific national roaming agreements for the places where the LTE network of the PMR or FR entity is lacking coverage or resources. Specific legislation is enforced by the state.
Model 2: The long established mobile network operators deploy a public safety LTE network and provide communication services to first responders. In this case, the mobile network operator holds the traditional role of communication services provisioning, with the following key differences: the LTE mobile network is only dedicated to public safety communications, and the customers for this network are only first responders, and possibly selected end-users. The services provided from the mobile network operator to first responders are controlled by specific SLAs and security agreements, while specific security agreements and legislation can be enforced by the state. Indicatively, the mobile network operator could deploy this dedicated public safety network using any unused frequency spectrum (e.g. TDD spectrum in conventional 900/1800/2100 MHz bands or dedicated 700 MHz spectrum).
Model 3: The long established mobile network operators deploy a public mobile LTE network for the provision of commercial communication services and it is interconnected to first responders' offices, PSAPs and/or PMRs. In this case, the mobile network operator plays the traditional role of provisioning communication services and supporting emergency services based on national and international legislation. This is the business model that is followed currently in all European countries and for all network operators. The mobile operators' responsibility is limited to the interconnection of end users with first responders in the areas where service is available (e.g. LTE coverage). Specific security agreements and legislation is enforced by the state.
It shall be admitted that in the first model, the role of the mobile network operator is undertaken by other entities, while in the third, the economic revenues are marginal and depend highly on the business model, the identity of the end-users (e.g. private security services, public first responders, end-users) and the mobile operator agreements. On the other hand, depending on national legislation no charging can be enforced on public safety services, at least for primitive voice call and message services; while it is usually mandatory for mobile network operators to provide emergency communications both from the regulatory and legislation perspective and in the context of the mobile operators Corporate Social Responsibility activities. On the other hand the second model requires high capital expenses and implies the use of specific terminals (e.g. TDD compliant and/or compatible with selected Public Safety spectrum band); other than the massively available for commercial mobile communication. This fact renders the second model not preferable from the mobile network operator's perspective and even more importantly, inconsistent with the basic GERYON concept for all-in-one terminal services provisioning. To conclude, (marginal) new economic revenue streams could be expected only in the third model addressing specific communication needs of first responders with third parties. Therefore, the only profitable business case for the mobile operator can be the one described by the third model.
Strengths Weaknesses
◊ Market experience and knowledge of user requirements at critical situations: COSMOTE has a long-life experience with the provision of communication services at critical situations.
◊ Cutting-edge LTE infrastructure: COSMOTE is the leading mobile operator in Greece, having an impressive record of very important market firsts. In addition, COSMOTE’s LTE (4G) network is continuously expanding covering so far 55 areas, including the largest cities and the most important tourist places.
◊ Large customer base: COSMOTE is the leading mobile operator in Greece possessing the greatest market share (almost 50%). ◊ Difficulties or lack of communication between first responder services/emergency agencies due to the lack of organisational/structural communication procedures.
◊ Current global economic crisis situation: lack of economic resources in Greece for new investments especially from the public sector emergency agencies.
•
Opportunities Threats
◊ GERYON technological approach (LTE/IMS based) is in line with:
• major providers solutions and technology trends regarding the use of IMS
• the forthcoming standardisation –regarding the use of LTE as the standards for mobile broadband emergency services-
• COSMOTE’s strategy to follow the 3GPP LTE technology path for the provision of next generation mobile broadband services.
◊ Increasing end user interest for private security and public emergency services:
◊ GERYON project impact in different TETRA and Critical Communications forums. Many providers have shown their interest in the GERYON concept.
◊ Marginal increase in COSMOTE revenues by providing GERYON enriched services over LTE to specific private security agencies.
◊ Possibility of new strategic agreements/partnership with public and/or private security agencies. ◊ A sluggish economy: Due to the current general economic landscape in Greece, many companies are reluctant to invest on new infrastructure.
◊ Regulatory environment: government regulations on the telecommunications industry may imply that COSMOTE is obliged to offer advanced emergency services and high capacity for security/emergency communications without any economical benefit.
•
Table 7: SWOT analysis: The Mobile Network Operator Business Case
The Public TETRA Operator Business Case
ITELAZPI currently provides advanced, secure and reliable TETRA solutions to various professional public services such as municipal police, fire brigades, public transport organisations, public work squads, ambulances, etc. In line with the latest technology developments, TETRA users are required to communicate with commercial voice and data networks of different nature (fixed telephony users, GSM/3G services and Internet applications); and it is envisaged that the demand to integrate with next generation fixed and mobile networks such as LTE and Wimax will significantly increase in the short term.
Therefore, GERYON project gives ITELAZPI an interesting opportunity to explore other challenges and assess the different options to converge the existing networks and solutions with the latest TETRA, LTE and IMS infrastructures with the aim to provide with more enhanced and developed emergency services.
The business models outlined as a result of a first analysis are:
Model 1: Private network: make commercial mobile networks fit for purpose for mission critical users. That would mean network operators investing significant amounts in their infrastructure.
Model 2: Public network: ITEL (Government) organisation owns the network and provides Broadband services to mission critical users. Requires spectrum allocation by the public organisations, and competition laws will also have to be revised.
Model 3: Shared/Hybrid model, by means of public-private partnership models. Use existing TETRA network owned and managed by ITEL and complement it with a commercial private broadband services provided by operators. Minimizes the required CAPEX and protects the existing investments in narrowband TETRA.
However, this initial business plan options require further analysis in depth, and are subject to change, and will be reviewed in agreement to the market evolution and the local operator LTE plans (when region-wide coverage is reached)
Strengths Weaknesses
◊ Market experience and user requirement know- how: ITEL is a respected brand name among Basque public administration end users.
◊ Cutting-edge TETRA infrastructure: ITEL owns a well-established region wide infrastructure. This is a major advantage because it enables to capture new customers and for its characteristics it provides an easy adaptation to LTE/IMS.
◊ Valued customer service: proven by ITEL’s good results in customer satisfaction surveys. ◊ Late adoption of 4G-LTE from Spanish mobile operators – lack of a commercially available region-wide LTE network from local mobile operators, that would enable a GERYON enabled services to current customers in the Basque Country.
◊ Current global economic crisis situation: lack of economic resources in Basque Public Administration for new investments (that affects both to ITEL and end users).
•
Opportunities Threats
◊ New technology – GERYON technological approach (IMS based) is in line with major providers solutions and technology trends (Public Safety LTE US for instance).
◊ Increasing end user interest: many of ITEL’s current end users value the added services a combined TETRA-LTE solution via GERYON could provide.
◊ GERYON project impact in different TETRA and Critical Communications forums. Many providers have shown their interest in the GERYON concept.
◊ Increase in ITEL revenues by providing converged TETRA+ LTE GERYON enriched services.
◊ Possibility of new strategic agreements/partnership with LTE providers. ◊ A sluggish economy.
◊ Regulatory environment: increased government regulations within the telecommunications industry. Spanish Market and Competence National Commission (CNMC) new directives/guidelines regarding ITEL Business Model oriented to a LTE+PMR market segment may set restrictions for ITEL to provide converged services.
◊ LTE spectrum issue not clarified.
◊ ITELAZPI’s future as a public company: many political proposals to adjust/tighten public companies network in Basque Administration
•
Table 8: SWOT analysis: The Public TETRA Operator Business Case
Over-The-Top Specialized Emergency Service Provider
The exploitation opportunities of the different solutions identified in the “Specialized Emergency Service Provider” section are decoupled of the actual network connectivity. This business model is focused on the deployment and maintenance of the service layer, offering additional capabilities over the “raw” data plans contracted by professional end users.
Thus, the scope and possible impact of the marketable solutions are different taking into account different potential target sectors:
Service Model 1: Integral solution including the multi-domain core services, the future commercial-grade PSCC and 4GAPS nodes. The target customers would be big clients such as administration or mobile network operators, with a portfolio of multiple target Public Safety organizations with interoperability needs. This business case could be linked to the Business Model 2 of the “Mobile Network Operator” section, aimed at aiding in the implementation of mission-critical services over commercial data connections. Depending on the MNO infrastructure, the value added product could be either the expertise in the organizational aspects and specific emergency services, or the deployment of specific PSCC / 4GAPS nodes depending on the needs.
Service Model 2:Deployment of specific PSCC / 4GAPS, based on value added capabilities such as group communications, QoS management or enhanced location services. Stakeholders planning deployments related to next generation IP-based emergency networks may be interested on incorporating different aspects of this set of capabilities.
Service Model 3:Targeting small scope organizations, which may be interested in transition models towards IP-based services to enhance their daily emergency operations. This type of users (e.g. local administrations, municipalities, small ambulance companies, etc.) may want to exploit their data plans for a enhanced location or multimedia-enabled services in an integrated way. The solutions proposed and validated in the scope of the GERYON project have raised interest in different sectors.
These different business models have been identified and preliminary explored. The leading partner of these marketable solutions is UPV/EHU. Although these products could be sold as independent modules for OTT service provisioning, joint ventures with other GERYON partners would be required in order to provide more complete solutions or to offer specific functionalities: service provisioning coupled with MNO infrastructures, interoperability with deployed TETRA infrastructures, transcoding / cross-ciphering services, displaying-management interfaces, specific emergency Application Servers, etc.
Strengths Weaknesses
◊ Completely compatible IMS approach: An IMS-based compatibility makes possible the adaptation to different commercial IMS solutions.
◊ Enabler for interoperability systems based on a confidence entity (“any-to-one peering” concept).
◊ Generic design of emergency services over IMS.
◊ Aligned with industry movements towards VoLTE in the U.S. and U.K. ◊ License: Originally focused on open source solutions leading cores to be commercialized as service and not as product. At first it is proposed as a virtualized service to be included in the all-in-one solution (when no commercial IMS core already available).
◊ Stability: Its stability should be comprehensively assessed so as to be a marketable product.
◊ Awareness of end users: From the feedback obtained, contacted possible end users are initially attracted by the concept of emergency services provision over commercial mobile networks, but there is still a lack of a climate with enough confidence to dissociate them from the traditional PMR networks.
Opportunities Threats
◊ Provision of emergency services based on standardised commercial cellular technologies, with the approaches of the provision of scalable OTT services:
• Interesting for end users in crisis time.
• It avoids temporal solutions that vary with the new specifications of standardization organisms or with the commercial offer of the vendors.
◊ Both as a product but specially as an engineering outcome: There is a necessity of transmitting it to stakeholders, administration, etc. ◊ Competence/reputation.
• There exist solutions to deploy IMS services in infrastructure or cloud.
• It is necessary to have interviews with stakeholders, presentations, exhibitions, etc.
◊ Standardization trends: The 3GPP is focused on the incorporation of Public Safety capabilities in LTE; a direction change could happen. It seems that the management of services will be based on the IMS architecture to some extent.
•
Table 9: SWOT analysis: Over-The-Top Specialized Emergency Service Provider
4.2. Main dissemination activities
Dissemination is essential to the success of a project through making relevant stakeholders aware of the existence, purpose and achievement of a project. In order to present the GERYON project to a broad range of stakeholders (e.g. researchers, the general public, first responders and market vendors), various channels of dissemination have been utilised during the project life time (i.e. 01 December 2011 – 31 May 2013). In this section, an overview of all dissemination methods that were employed by the GERYON consortium and their results will be presented.
With the purpose of ensuring the GERYON project is well disseminated, many approaches have been utilised during the entire 30-month of the project period and a fruitful set of outcomes have been achieved. In general, three main methods were utilised for the dissemination activities and their results are listed as below:
• Publications
o 4 press releases,
o 16 published articles,
o 21 papers (including 4 journal papers and 17 conference papers),
• Dissemination tools
o 1 general leaflet was created and it has been distributed in various end-user meetings, events and workshops,
o Specific leaflets created for attended events,
o 5 GERYON newsletters with a total of 291 downloads,
o 1 project website (including both public and private sections),
o 1 GERYON YouTube Channel, containing 11 videos with 652 of viewings,
• Dissemination events
o GERYON was presented in 4 different major international industrial events
o 1 international academic workshop
• GERYON days in Greece, Spain and the UK
In addition to the aforementioned results, other dissemination outcomes were also obtained by the GERYON consortium members, including interviews, presentations, liaison activities with other related projects and seminars. All of the dissemination results will be detailed in the following chapters.
4.2.1. Publications: Press Releases and Articles
In order to introduce the GERYON project to various stakeholders, the press release method was chosen by the consortium as its effectiveness and directness. With the aim of announcing the start of the GERYON project and presenting the background and concept of the project to the general public, research communities, first responders and industry leaders. Four press releases were published by members of the consortium via their official press offices, websites and newsletters from the beginning of 2012.
Figure 43: Screenshots of the GERYON press releases
Articles are very flexible as they can be tailored for special audience if needed. This flexibility allows the dissemination to be reached to varying but specific stakeholders. Based upon the foundation laid by the GERYON press releases, a total of 16 articles are composed and published in popular presses including national and regional newspapers, emergency services related journals and industrial special issues.
Figure 44: A selection of screenshots of the GERYON published articles
4.2.2. Scientific Papers
Journal papers:
• Fidel Liberal, Ianire Taboada, and Jose-Oscar Fajardo, “Dealing with Energy-QoE Trade-Offs in Mobile Video” Journal of Computer Networks and Communications, vol. 2013, Article ID 412491, 12 pages, 2013. doi:10.1155/2013/412491
• Is-Haka Mkwawa and Lingfen Sun, “Battery Voltage Discharge Rate Prediction and Video Content Adaptation in Mobile Devices over 3G Access Networks”, Journal of ZTE Communications March 2013 Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 44-50
• Jose Oscar Fajardo, Ianire Taboada, Fidel Liberal, "Cross-layer cross-domain adaptation of mobile video services", ICST Transactions on Mobile Communications and Applications, July-September 2012, Volume 12, Issue 7-9, e4, pp. 1-11
• Jose Oscar Fajardo, Fidel Liberal, Fudong Li, Nathan Clarke, Is-Haka Mkwawa, “End-to-middle-to-end solution for IMS media plane security”, Electronic Commerce Research (Springer). [accepted]
Relevant conference papers:
• F. Liberal, J. O. Fajardo, M. Ramos, H. Koumaras, Ch. Sakkas, M. A. Kourtis, "An IMS-based Interoperable Architecture for Heterogeneous Emergency Services", IEEE International Conference on Telecommunications and Multimedia (TEMU), Crete, Greece, 28-30 July 2014
• Fidel Liberal, Jose Oscar Fajardo, Naiara Goia, Ioanna Mesogiti, "Global standards, the key enablers for deploying next generation emergency communications networks", ITU Kaleidoscope 2014 - Living in a converged world - impossible without standards, 3-5 June 2014, Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation. [
• Louis Anegekuh, Lingfen Sun and Emmanuel Ifeachor, "Encoded Bitstream based Video Content Type Definition for HEVC Video Quality Prediction”, IEEE ICC 2014, 10-14 June, 2014, Sydney, Australia
• Jose Oscar Fajardo, Fidel Liberal, Fudong Li, Nathan Clarke, Is-Haka Mkwawa, Lingfen Sun, “Performance-driven Evaluation for Deploying IMS-based Interoperability Scenarios”, IEEE ICC 2014 – NGN (Next-Generation Networking Symposium), 10-14 June 2014, Sydney, Australia
• Jose Oscar Fajardo, Fidel Liberal, Is-Haka Mkwawa, Lingfen Sun, “Autonomous Adaptation Strategies for Multiuser Multimedia Transmissions in the LTE Uplink”, IEEE ICC 2014 – CSSMA (Communications Software, Services and Multimedia Applications Symposium), 10-14 June 2014, Sydney, Australia.
• Harilaos Koumaras, Christos Sakkas, Michail Alexandros Kourtis, Jose Oscar Fajardo, Fidel Liberal, "CC4IMS: A Mobile-based Open-Source Call Center for IMS", 2013 IEEE 24th International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications: Services, Applications and Business Track 8-11 September 2013, London, UK
• Fudong Li, Nathan Clarke, Steven Furnell, "A Technology Independent Security Gateway for Real-Time Multimedia Communication", The 7th International Conference on Network and System Security (NSS 2013), pp. 14-25, 3-4 June 2013, Madrid, Spain
• Ali Alfayly, Is-Haka Mkwawa, Lingfen Sun and Emmanuel Ifeachor, "QoE-based Performance Evaluation of Scheduling Algorithms over LTE", IEEE Globecom 2012, Workshop: Quality of Experience for Multimedia Communications (GC'12 Workshop - QoEMC), 03-07 December 2012, Disney Resort Destinations Anaheim, CA, USA
• Is-Haka Mkwawa and Lingfen Sun, "Power-Driven VoIP Quality Adaptation Over WLAN in Mobile Devices", IEEE Globecom 2012, Workshop: Quality of Experience for Multimedia Communications (GC'12 Workshop - QoEMC), 03-07 December 2012, Disney Resort Destinations Anaheim, CA, USA
• Is-Haka Mkwawa, Emmanuel Jammeh, Lingfen Sun, "Mapping of Received Signal Strength Indicator to QoE in VoIP Applications in WLAN", QoMEX 2012, , 5 – 7 July 2012, Yarra Valley, Australia
4.2.3. Dissemination Tools
With the purpose of disseminating the GERYON project both internally and externally, a number of dissemination tools are employed by the consortium, including a GERYON leaflet, GERYON newsletters, a public GERYON website and a GERYON YouTube channel.
The leaflet and newsletters are utilised to present generic project information (e.g. overview and updates) to the public domain in an easy understanding way. Ten videos, containing detailed project outcomes, can be accessed via the public GERYON YouTube channel. The usage of the project website is two-fold: a public facing website allows Internet users to access all project related information while a private website hosts sensitive project data that is only accessible by project partners and project reviewers.
Figure 45: GERYON website: and YouTube channel
4.2.4. Dissemination Events
Events (e.g. industrial exhibitions, conference and workshops) bring different stakeholders with the same interesting together to showcase latest technology to the public. With the aim of meeting other people in the emergency communication domain, the GERYON consortium takes the project into public for a number of times, including:
• Stand at the BAPCO 2013 exhibition and the EENA Conference 2014.
• Oral presentation at Critical Communications World 2013.
• Organising the GERYON ETS 2013 workshop (research oriented conference)
• Hosting GERYON Days in three European countries (i.e. Greece, Spain and the UK) to present GERYON achievements to end-users.
Figure 46: GERYON stands at BAPCO 2013 and EENA Conference 2014
4.2.5. Other Dissemination Activities
In addition to the aforementioned dissemination achievements presented, some other dissemination activities were also carried out by the GERYON consortium, including conducting interviews on radio and TV, presenting presentations in conferences, establishing liaison activities with other projects and hosting seminars.
4.3. Exploitation of results
To the date, the direct exploitation of results have been limited to scientific and standardisation outcomes.
Concerning commercial exploitation, there are several running initiatives mainly derived from the interactions with end users in the last phase of the project. Several end users have requested additional meetings to present the GERYON solution to them and to perform demonstrations at their premises.
In the future, the industrial members of the GERYON consortium intend not only to adopt and exploit the project outputs in their business strategies, but also to promote the GERYON novel communications framework and the related solutions.
Not only the industrial partners but also the academia have deeply explored the possibilities of the exploitation of the results.
• Further marketization, knowledge transference possibilities and joint ventures schemes have been comprehensively analysed.
• The joint participation by EHU, UoP and CYS to the U.K. Home Office ESMCP program is also a good example of the commitment of the partners towards turning GERYON outcomes into commercially viable products
List of Websites:
www.sec-geryon.eu
Coordinator Dr. Fidel Liberal
University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)
Faculty of Engineering of Bilbao (Spain)
Email: fidel.liberal@ehu.es
Phone: + 34 94 601 4129
GERYON is a R&D project of the call FP7-SEC-2011-1 of the 7th Framework Programme. It proposes the integration of the communication networks used by emergency –ambulances, fire brigades, civil protection teams– and safety (PMRs) management bodies with new generation telephone networks (4G, LTE). Thus, the multimedia capabilities of the new smartphones can be exploited with secure communication services provided by traditional security networks. These services include mechanisms for Push to Talk, group calls, location of terminals, etc.
The project work plan defined a series of design and implementation work packages aimed at developing a non-commercial demonstrator prototype, whose functionalities would be evaluated at the end of the Project on an international testbed.
At the end of the Project all its objectives have been successfully fulfilled, resulting in a fully working IMS compatible ecosystem capable of providing today PMR grade communications while paving the way for future profesional LTE networks.
Project Context and Objectives:
At the beginning of 2011 the idea of using VoIP technologies for providing Mission Critical communication services was by no means shared among the public safety community. In fact, there was a significant uncertainty about the near future evolution of classical PMR solutions due to spectrum scarcity, digital dividend issues and economic crisis. This being an environment with huge security, resilience and privacy requirements, relying on general-purpose infrastructures was extremely controversial, if not directly neglected by a vast majority. In fact, most emergency bodies were used to build and manage their own private communications infrastructure and interoperability had never been in the top list of priorities.
The need for enhanced emergency services, the economical crisis, unacceptable market entry barriers and the growing obsolescence of traditional PMRs when compared with nowadays broadband wireless broadband networks (and devices) resulted in a perfect storm that led to a path shift of the whole industry to IP technologies.
At that very initial stage, GERYON proposed facing this situation by seizing the existing window of opportunity due to the convergence of the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) and the imminent deployment of commercial LTE networks.
In order to do so, GERYON approach comprised an innovative emergency inter-networking system capable of connecting existing first responder communication systems and enabling the integration of next generation mobile networks by defining technology independent standardized interfaces and autonomic configuration and adaptation techniques under the umbrella of IMS, 3GPP’s suite of standards. Therefore, GERYON aimed at unifying common technical and operational logic of first responder communications networks in a technology independent manner.
Such unification would offload interconnection gateways from duplicated technology dependent details by providing a neutral interconnection interface. Proposed system would therefore ensure seamless operation regardless the access technology and take advantage of coverage and responsiveness of existing PMRs and broadband data services of 4G networks.
GERYON’s main objectives aimed at demonstrating both classical (i.e. PTT, MTP and preemptive calls) and enhanced emergency services (i.e. multimedia streaming and data services) over an across-frontier testbed. Furthermore, due to its capability for including general purpose IMS terminals and GERYON enhanced ones, the adoption of GERYON allows an easy access to first responder networks to different groups of users that will take advantage of enhanced services such as the Red Button over general purpose devices.
On February 22, 2012, U.S. President Obama signed into law the “Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012,” which included provisions to fund and govern a Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network in the U.S. that would be using LTE as the underlying radio technology and bring $7bn. budget for initial deployments and tests. Then, US NPSBN (first) and UK’s ESMCP crossroads and widely recognized adoption of LTE as next generation public safety network technology changed everything, aligning the whole market with the otherwise humble R&D GERYON project and putting project outcomes at the same level that biggest telcos’ and military huge companies’ proposals.
In order to pursue this ambitious goal the specific objectives of the project were:
• Objective 1: To design, develop and demonstrate a fully operational IMS-driven emergency services management platform.
• Objective 2: To design and develop an innovative GERYON Enhanced Management System (GEMS) and related MGW and SGW nodes.
• Objective 3: To research and develop advanced decision support logic for a technology agnostic management of emergency communications.
• Objective 4: To design a reference gateway (GEGW) and develop a specific GEGW supporting the integration of TETRA users into IMS.
• Objective 5: To design and develop a GERYON compatible software client which will allow using a subset of GERYON services through non-GERYON access networks.
• Objective 6: To develop, evaluate and demonstrate enhanced emergency services support in 4G LTE network.
• Objective 7: To use and disseminate knowledge widely, enabling the standardization and the commercial exploitation of the project outcomes.
• Objective 8: To manage and coordinate project activities to enable the Consortium to achieve its goals and objectives on time and within budget.
A detailed description of these high level objectives will be described in the following sections.
O1: Fully operational IMS-driven emergency services management platform
This Objective comprised building a common GERYON network infrastructure based on the IMS technology, including the different IMS domains, User profiles, the central GEMS node, the different interfaces among core and support nodes:
• Design and deploy IMS core components and their relations. On top of them, IMS services (single/group calls, location services, identity management, security, etc.) and functions to support them (call routing, XDMS servers, etc.) (O1.1).
• The definition of user profiles involves identifying the information to be included and how it will be organized and linked together. In order to support seamless integration with different IMS cores without modification, the use of IMS user profiles was from the very beginning crucial for defining the GERYON overall architecture and some of the internal modules of the GEMS (O1.2).
• Carefully analyse and design services mainly used in the PMR world (such as GroupCall, Push-To-Talk, Location or Presence Services), in order to export them to the IMS technology when not available in general purpose IMS stacks (O1.3).
• Contribute to the promotion of the GERYON project among standardisation bodies and industry fora from different fields (such as telecommunication, multimedia, PMR or mobile operators) offering a practical view gained during integration activities (O1.4).
O2: GERYON Enhanced Management System (GEMS) and related MGW and SGW design and development
O2 included the design and deployment of a technology agnostic GERYON Enhanced Management System (GEMS) comprising Identity Management, Security, Signalling, Transcoding and Enhanced Emergency Services functionalities, so that a seamless communication between GERYON users from different access technologies is guaranteed. Additionally, Security and Transcoding operations will be performed in two separate nodes: SGW (Security Gateway) and MGW (Media Gateway), allowing the integration of GERYON compliant third party devices.
The fulfilment of the design and deployment of GEMS and SGW/MGW will comprise the following subojectives:
• Bring together all technical and non technical (organisational) requirements in order to define the functionality of the GEMS module. Consequently, it will entail an analysis on end user preferences regarding the services to be provided and the definition of technical requirements for IMS compatibility (O2.1).
• Fully define GEMS and its internal modules (RCM, SMM, TMM, ESMM and TAMS), their interfaces and the data to be interchanged, so that it matches the defined use cases using IMS compliant mechanisms (O2.2).
• Specificy and integrate the GEMS node into the IMS architecture, so that it can be easily exported to commercial scenarios in order to facilitate a commercial exploitation of its modules (O2.3).
• Design and development of the key components of the GEMS system including TAMS and Control Room interface, including the TAMS module and a basic control room for demonstration purposes. The call controlling capability, which will enable the initiation, modification and termination of sessions, will be a common feature for all modules and TAMS will be in charge of controlling its logic. GEMS modules perform the following actions: resource management (RCM), enhanced service management (ESMM), transcoding/multimedia management (TMM) and security management (SMM) (O2.4).
• Design and development of the GMGW, the module in charge of the transcoding procedures so that terminals using different codecs can communicate through the GERYON platform. Since the MGW must interact with the GEMS, it must also implement an IMS interface (O2.5).
• Design and development of the GSGW, the module in charge module is responsible for enabling a secure communication between GERYON users using different security mechanisms, carrying out the adequate cross-ciphering and key management procedures. It must also have an IMS compatible interface to communicate with GEMS. (O2.6).
• Specify the interfaces of the management modules in the GEMS with the TD-EGS, MGW and SGW, including the definition of the high level information interchanged between the GEMS modules and external GERYON modules (TD-EGS, MGW and SGW) (O2.7)
O3: TAMS logic research and development
The TAMS module represents the intelligence of the GERYON system and carries out all decision-making and adaptation control processes so as to meet service requirements regarding the availability of resources. Since GERYON connects heterogeneous radio systems, TAMS central coordination of these resources is essential. The research activities will be focused on determining how the resource control mechanisms affect the network performance and how this also has its effect on users’ perception at the same time. The whole target is broken down into the following second level objectives:
• Design and implement a centralized repository covering organisations, user groups, device characteristics, priorities, etc.), so that it can perform its decision tasks adequately (O3.1).
• Research the interactions with the different TD-EGS considered by defining the communication regarding flow diagrams and messages that will be interchanged between GEMS and all different TD-EGS nodes that take part in GERYON (O3.2).
• Research the effects of alternative communication settings into end users, since diverse communication conditions will have a strong effect on the quality end users receive in their terminals in critical situations, so that TAMS decision algorithms will have to choose the best settings for the conversations in these situation (O3.3).
• Orchestrate the fulfilment of grade of service requirements by proposing algorithms in charge of enabling the service requirements based on different service characteristics and resource availability, in order to provide PMR services while medium resources are correctly optimized (O3.4).
• To design and develop the internal interfaces between TAMS and the different management modules in order TAMS to obtain the information it needs (statistics, priorities, etc.) and to instruct the actions that must be performed (call dropping, codec selection, etc.) (O3.5).
O4: GEGW reference GW and TETRA specific pilot GEGW
This objective deals with the definition of the methods to translate the technology dependant data and call management functions to the IMS world. A general GEGW common to different PMR technologies and a specific GEGW for TETRA users will be implemented for demonstration purposes according to the following steps:
• Specify a reference GEGW in order to connect different networks to the GERYON infrastructure that includes an IMS compliant interface to communicate with GERYON modules. This subobjective also includes the design and development of internal modules and the definition of technology agnostic information to be interchanged (O4.1).
• Design and develop a particular GEGW for TETRA, with the purpose of testing the whole GERYON. Specific technology dependent modules in this gateway deal with TETRA user management, emergency service provision, transcoding and security functionalities (O4.2).
O5: GERYON clients
This Objective is focused on the design and development of GERYON terminals for both citizen and PMR agencies. These terminals will let them access GERYON emergency services.
• Specify client requirements and security limitations for GERYON terminals, whose features and security restrictions will differ depending on the users addressed (O5.1).
• Design and develop a software client codebase to support GERYON-related basic IMS emergency communications by extending a Android based general purpose IMS stacks with needed IMS features for providing GERYON services were not available (O5.2).
• Design and develop specific user interfaces to launch the emergency communications, such as the Red Button and PMR functionalities (O5.3).
• Design and develop client features to provide advanced feedback to GEMS (performance, Cell-ID, QoS, etc.). Sometimes this information will be available to the devices, but other times they will need the help of other modules, such as the TD-EGS (O5.3).
O6. Emergency services support in 4G LTE network.
GERYON emergency services will be exported to 4G LTE networks. Due to the poor current level of deployment of these networks a thorough analysis of the SoTA regarding emergency services in LTE must be performed. Regarding the design, a specific module called TD-EGS will be in charge of providing LTE users connectivity to GERYON services.
• Review standardisation activities related to LTE emergency communications (O6.1)
• Specificy IMS-driven LTE emergency communications in order some features (QoS, prioritization, identities, etc.) to be correctly transferred from the LTE world to IMS (O6.2).
• Design and develop a LTE TD-EGS in order to provide GEMS with network specific information in order to assure LTE-GERYON compatibility including group management, network resources allocation and location and network performance information provision (O6.3).
• Test and validate all proposed IMS-driven LTE emergency services (O6.4)
O7: Dissemination of the project outcomes
One of the main goals of the GERYON project is to spread the knowledge acquired during its development, to contribute to the standardization of its features and to enable a commercial exploitation of its results. These dissemination activities are addressed to both the general public and to expert industry and standardization fora including:
• Develop and maintain GERYON website in order to gather the latest important information of the GERYON project (O7.1).
• Disseminate project to both general public and scientific community with appropriated tools including i.e. press releases (adequate for the general public) to scientific publications in journals or conferences (O7.2).
• Define a business plan for the commercial exploitation of the project’s results (O7.3).
• Contribute to standardisation activities and fora, ranging from traditional telcos to PMR equipment distributors (O7.4).
O8: Efficient Project management and coordination
This Objective comprises the evaluation of partners’ performance in order to foresee possible problems and to be able to apply the necessary corrective measures in time. Other activities are related with the management of communication among consortium members and also with external agents by:
• Providing an effective project management framework including a roadmap to state specific low level milestones and deliverable formats and control activities (i.e. meetings) (O8.1).
• Regularly reviewing and assessing of the partners’ performance, by using Quarterly Management Reports (QMRs) two Intermediate Progress Reports to help in the supervision of financial issues and partners’ performance (O8.2).
Project Results:
In order to make it easier for the reader to assess the results according to the original objectives a table compiling a summary of the per-objective related activities has been included in the Publishable Summary pdf file uploaded to the Participant Portal.
The following sections will cover the results per objective.
* Fully operational IMS-driven emergency services management platform (O1)
** Design and development of the modules of the GEMS and its interfaces with both existing IMS infrastructure and GERYON elements (O1.1)
GERYON proposes an ecosystem where all the involved GERYON players can interoperate based on a common technology at higher layers, while keeping their current technologies for intra-organisation operations at lower layers. Figure 2 illustrates the general architecture for GERYON interoperable ecosystem, and identifies the specific elements that are needed in order to enable the integration of the different GERYON players, including multiple Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs), call centres responsible for answering calls to an emergency telephone number for police, fire station, ambulance services etc.
Therefore, the GERYON architectural concept relies on a hierarchical IMS structure, where two IMS (native or enabled by GEGW) domains that belong to different emergency organizations are controlled by the GEMS, which operates at another independent IMS domain (the GERYON domain). This design is imposed by the GERYON organisational requirements in order to allow any two organizations to interoperate without further configuration / agreements between them.
Once the GERYON overall system approach was determined, the identification and specifications of all the IMS standardised elements and procedures (covered in Sections 4 and 5 of D2.2.) was carried out. All this analysis leaded to the architecture depicted in Figure 2 (in the attached Publishable Summary pdf file) and reported in D2.2. Each one of GERYON nodes’ characteristics was comprehensively described:
• The GERYON Enhanced Management System (GEMS), the central management node of GERYON ecosystem, is located in the GERYON IMS domain and comprises the management logic for all GERYON emergency services.
• GERYON Media Gateway (GERYON MGW or GMGW), located also within the GERYON IMS domain is specified as the specialised support gateway that performs media transcoding operations if required in a media session as requested by GEMS.
GERYON Security Gateway (GERYON SGW or GSGW), located within the GERYON IMS domain is specified as the specialized support gateway that performs cross-ciphering operations at media level if required in a media session as requested by GEMS. Since different emergency organisations may implement different encryption mechanisms for the media data, cross-ciphering within the GERYON domain may be necessary. GSGW interfaces with GEMS in a similar way to GMGW.
GERYON defines two functional elements acting as GERYON enablers at organisation level in order to ensure that the different organisations comply with GERYON requirements.
• The Technology Dependent Emergency GERYON Services (TD-EGS) is specified as the GERYON enabler for emergency organisations endowed with IMS-based network infrastructures for emergency communications. Although these organisations may be able to establish basic IMS sessions with GERYON IMS domain, specific support for some PMR-grade functionalities would differ between different deployments. Thus, TD-EGS is in charge of mapping the intra-organisation procedures to GERYON IMS domain compliant ones.
• The GERYON Enhanced GateWay (GEGW) is specified as the GERYON enabler for non-IMS emergency organisations, including traditional PMR organisations based e.g. on TETRA/TETRAPOL technologies. This reference gateway interconnects existing first responder PMR networks to the new IMS-based GERYON emergency inter-networking architecture, and in turn to the GERYON GEMS module.
GERYON terminals enable users to support direct access to GERYON basic and enhanced services regardless the access network and its IMS capabilities. GERYON terminals comprise i) a software client implementing traditional IMS signalling and ii) GERYON compliant operations, related to security, location and specific applications support.
Out of this architecture, the description of all the nodes was carried out resulting in:
• Specification of internal functional modules concerning GEMS, GEGW and TD-EGS. Identification of existing technologies and IMS-based functional elements.
• Specification of internal functional modules concerning GSGW and GMGW. Identification of existing technologies and IMS-based functional elements. Detection of a lack of support in 3GPP standards for GSGW features.
• Specified of IMS client terminals, referring to hardware and its application, to be used for emergency communication for demonstration purposes.
• Specification of internal functional modules concerning GEMS, GEGW and TD-EGS. Identification of existing technologies and IMS-based functional elements.
• Specification of internal functional modules concerning GSGW and GMGW. Identification of existing technologies and IMS-based functional elements. Detection of a lack of support in 3GPP standards for GSGW features.
Additionally for each one of the more than 20 basic, enhanced services, communication categories and use cases defined in D.2.2 , a comprehensive representation of standard compliant operation (together with flow diagram) was carried out and reported in D2.2. (see Figure 3 and Figure 4 in the attached Publishable Summary pdf file for a example of “category 3.1: Individual call between different technologies with compatible codecs and security parameters”).
Four different IMS core for 112-style emergency services have deployed and installed at NCSRD VM infrastructure (depicted on Figure in the publishable summary pdf file) and EHU premises. OpenIMSCore has been utilized as code base for the GERYON purposes and adapted to the needs of the GERYON multi-organization overall architecture.
For the IMS deployment needs of the project, the use of the open source IMS core (although later Kamailio was also tested) was initially decided, which is an open source implementation of the IMS which allows the configuration and the customization that may be needed for building the GERYON solution.
**Extension and enhancement of IMS user profiles (O1.2)
Finally, there was no need to extend IMS user profiles. Instead, the carefully chosen namespaces and Initial Filter Criteria and triggering points associated to each type of users considered in GERYON have allowed a seamless operation over un-tweaked Out-Of-The-Box IMS cores (see D2.2 D3.4 and specially D6.1 and D6.3 for detailed configuration mechanisms and resulting traces).
Design and development of currently unsupported IMS services in order to provide ** PMR-grade emergency services (O1.3)
GERYON GEMS implements specific control logic in combination with standard IMS services in order to provide enhanced PMR-level services. Therefore, in addition to GEMS service enablers, three additional specific Group call, Push-to-talk and Group Messaging Application Servers deployed at GERYON domain will handle service specific operations using existing IMS interfaces and procedures:
These ASs were fully designed and developed due to lack of available open implementations or lack of specific GERYON-compatible functionalities, so they were implemented either from scratch or based on third-party software.
The Group Call Application Server, also commonly denoted as Conference Server in IMS, is devoted to handling the signalling and media planes for multiparty full-duplex audio calls. Therefore, all the session establishment procedures can be implemented with IMS SIP messages. The resulting media plane is depicted in Figure 6 in the publishable summary pdf file. In the case of GERYON, the audio multiparty calls are managed by GEMS in 3PCC mode, which is in charge of initiating the IMS procedures coordinating each endpoint with the Group Call AS. Thus, the GERYON Group Call AS needs to support specific 3PCC operations, such as the reception of empty SDP messages in the initial INVITE.
The Push-to-Talk (PTT) or Push-to-Talk over Cellular (PoC) Application Server (AS) is devoted to handling the signalling and media planes for one-to-one (point-to-point) and one-to-many (point-to-multipoint) one-way audio calls. To achieve this, the PTT AS is in charge of 1) managing the floor control between two or multiple PTT Clients participating in a PTT call session, and 2) receiving the RTP flows that come from the PTT Client which has taken the floor (right to talk) and distributing them to the other parties.
Finally, the Group Messaging Application Server makes use of MSRP to exchange multimedia messages among a group of users. An example of its overall signalling mechanisms is depicted in the Figure 7 in the publishable summary pdf file.
The development of the PMR grade services supporting IMS nodes was carried out in WP3 and reported in D3.4. As all the other nodes, they were integrated during WP6 and final e2e results were collected in D6.1 and D6.3.
The Group Call Application Server has been implemented using SEMS www.iptel.org/sems in the same way as GEMS. It has been developed as a SEMS plug-in that will make use of core SEMS classes to offer its functionalities. As an example, Figure 8 in the publishable summary pdf file shows a network trace of an actual session involving GEMS and the Group Call AS. The figure focuses on the signalling plane messages between both nodes through the core IMS nodes.
In the case of GERYON, the PTT calls are enabled by GEMS and mainly managed by the GERYON PTT AS playing the Controlling PoC Server function as specified by OMA and presented in the D3.2 Section 3.2.5.i.b. The implementation reference architecture is depicted in the Figure 9. The PTT AS is driven by the Controlling Server Core which manages all the others functions of the server. This server core relies on the SIP User Agent for session establishment/initiation negotiation. It also relies on the TBCP Manager and the underlying RTCP Encoder/Decoder for the floor control management and RTCP commands sending/receiving. The RTP Streamer/Receiver and the One-Way Conference Manager are used by the server core for the audio data dispatching. The later also accesses to the external XDMS Server by means of the XCAP Client and its related Query Manager modules. The core server is started by the Server Main module after reading the configuration parameters parsed at start-up by the ArgParser module.
The Group Messaging application Server (GMS) is an IMS Application Server that handles all the group messaging functions. It works without needing interaction from the users and it communicates with the S-CSCF module. GMS requires a Linux OS with python 2.7 installed.
* GERYON Enhanced Management System (GEMS) and related MGW and SGW design and development (O2)
** Collection of the requirements to be fulfilled by GEMS (O2.1)
This objective was particularly addressed by WP2 and comprised both technical and non technical requirements gathering. In particular, and firstly, D2.1 “Emergency communications: current state and users' requirements" -M6-, included all the requirements for GERYON system development, from the perspective of both the end users’ needs and the technological evolution and capabilities. Therefore, the work was focused on the user requirements definition based on data collected by primary research and more specifically by surveys/questionnaires to professional PMR end-users (e.g. policemen, firefighters etc.).
The results of this study ensured that the GERYON project objectives and specifications were in line with the current state of the emergency communications world. After this analysis, an interaction phase with GERYON end users was carried out in order to fetch a detailed view of what the possible GERYON users require for their daily operations. The results of this phase were used for the detailed specification and design of the overall GERYON solution for interoperability (collected in D2.1 see a example of the results in Table 2 in the publishable summary pdf file).
Regarding End Users requirements gathering stage:
• End user specific material was edited and translated into Spanish/Basque, English and Greek (some examples are shown in Annex 1 of D2.1).
• Several meetings were arranged at the beginning of the project (and other, i.e. Alava Red Cross, during the implementation stage), as well as telephone interviews and e-mailing interactions with different end users were carried out; a web page for gathering survey results in UK was also deployed (https://www.cscan.org/surveys/index.php?sid=44559&lang=en).
• 35 surveys were conducted with End Users from 3 different countries (Spain, UK, Greece). A specific area (user forum) in the website was enabled for interacting with End Users (upload of project description material, http://www.sec-geryon.eu/sec_geryon_forum/index.php).
• Statistics analysis of users’ preferences depending on their background was carried out (see Annex 2 of D2.1 for more detailed information)
Regarding the Technical Requirements gathering, the following ones are the more relevant results (most of them also collected in Section 4 and Annexes 3,4 and 5 of D2.1):
• Comprehensive analysis of current SoTA of emergency communications in LTE/IMS/TETRA, covering more than 200 technical specifications, standards and references (see Figure 11 in the publishable summary pdf file).
• Overall description of LTE, IMS and TETRA technologies from the point of view of emergency communications.
• LTE and TETRA state of the art thorough investigation and current and future emergency-related capabilities understanding.
• IMS state of the art: Available implementations and programming frameworks analysis. IMS-based emergency communications analysis, for both 112 and PMR grade communications.
• Overview of current state of commercial / business emergency solutions: novel solutions developed, technology-specific evolutions, hybrid solutions adopted, etc.
• Specific comparison of different aspects of emergency communication. This comparison has become a high value hands-on-guide for researcher and technicians with State-of-the-Art description of key similarities and difference among analysed technologies.
** Definition and specification of GEMS (O2.2)
GEMS is the central management entity of GERYON and from an operational perspective it is defined to operate as a 3rd Party Call Controller (3PCC) that uses two main modes of operation based on B2BUA, Routeing and Initiating B2BUA. Such element is introduced within the IMS architecture as an Application Server defined both in 3GPP TS 23.228 and in more detail in TS 23.218. All these specifications and requirements have been taken into consideration in order to define the GEMS ESMM, which is made up of specialised enabler modules with scope to enhance the IMS standardised emergency ASs and services in a network-controlled fashion.
As a result, from a service-level standpoint GEMS is split into the following modules:
• GEMS/TAMS is defined as the basic call controller that receives all the originating SIP messages aimed at the creation of an IMS communication. GEMS/TAMS acts as a routeing B2BUA and implements all the necessary functionalities in order to ensure the correct processing and forwarding of the SIP dialog.
• GEMS/ESMM is defined as a set of distributed modules, which consists of the specialised service enablers (one for each service) that provide additional service logic to the standardised IMS procedures and ASs in order to allow the provision of GERYON services.
• The Security Management Module (SMM) is responsible for handling the technology independent security associations and granting the privacy and integrity of multimedia flows. If end users do not share common ciphering mechanisms, the final ciphering/deciphering operations is carried out in the GSGW (using the IMS Back-to-Back User Agent -B2BUA- paradigm) ensuring interoperability between different end user terminals including legacy PMR ones.
• The Transcoding/multimedia Management Module (TMM) is responsible for handling the compatibility of multimedia flows in terms of encoding, by launching the GMGW operation if required. GEMS/TAMS implements the decision-making logic regarding the best combination of voice/multimedia codecs at session setup and during service lifetime. If required by TAMS, TMM will launch the specialised transcoding of multimedia content in the centralised operation mode through the GMGW (using the IMS B2BUA paradigm), ensuring interoperability between any possible end user terminals including legacy PMR ones.
The use of 3PCC for transcoding purposes is defined as well in TS 23.228 (section 5.14 Annex P) and TS 23.218 (section 8.1.4 and Annex B.2.3). Those standards show how a 3PCC AS is able to configure a MRFC node in order to derive a media flow from non-compatible endpoints. These standards will be the base of the GEMS TAMS, TMM and SMM module interaction for the case that real time codec and security adaptation is needed.
Finally, the use of the 3PCC approach for managing interdomain QoS at signalling plane has not been addressed by 3GPP. Thus, GEMS RCM function will follow a similar operation to the previous 3PCC procedures, although its specific operation will be further analysed.
** Specification and integration of the GEMS node into the IMS architecture (O2.3)
The specification of GEMS in terms of IMS procedures follows the guidelines and standards defined in the previous subsection according to the GERYON overall IMS ecosystem. Regarding integration, being the central GERYON node GEMS has been included in nearly all the designed IoT activities during WP6 (check D6.1 and D6.3 for reference).
Figure 12 in the publishable summary pdf file shows the typical outcome of one of such test after integration activities. Note that the figure is automatically generated out of actual network traces, demonstrating therefore that the SEMS based GEMS prototype is capable of interacting with all the IMS cores. In the example a IMS (LTE) user calls a TETRA user and GEMS is responsible for carrying out the proper identity mapping and B2BUA signalling.
Design and development of the key components of the GEMS system including ** TAMS and control room interface (O2.4)
GEMS prototype is built up on top of SEMS version 1.4.2 which is a media and application server for SIP based communications. Therefore, additional features within GEMS have been developed as SEMS plug-ins that can be invoked dynamically (using the built-in dynamic interface API called AmDynInvoke) by the main application or other existing modules. These plug-ins offer specific APIs that enable the invocation of their functionalities to other modules.
Moreover, in order to provide an external interface for the access and control of the current status of the server, the built-in XMLRPC module in SEMS permits to easily export the APIs of the different plug-ins via XMLRPC when used as a XMLRPC server. Additionally, it can be used as a XMLRPC client to execute functions residing in external modules to SEMS. This feature enables for example the visualization of the current active sessions within GERYON through a web interface.
See Figure 13 in the publishable summary pdf file (and GERYON D3.4) for a detailed architecture of the GEMS technological design.
A built from scratch GEMS prototype with all the GERYON requirements has been developed (based on aforementioned SEMS open source SIP B2BUA platform), deployed, integrated and tested. The myriad of network traces and evidences of performance in different deliverables and network traces uploaded to GERYON private area demonstrate the achieved performance level.
The GERYON mobile control room is based on Android platform and provides a Call Center capable of managing many organizations and users. The core module of the GERYON control room is a Listener Service, which concentrates the SIP messages from the call-related IMS signaling, the MSRP messages for the chat related content and finally the Presence messages from the XDMS and Presence server of the IMS. The Listener service interacts with the GERYON control room GUI either in standby or active mode, which in turn further manages the calls, the messages, the map or the group by the user interaction.
A prototype implementation of the GERYON Control Room has been developed and is currently available as open source project https://code.google.com/p/cc4ims/ .
The GERYON mobile Control Room implementation uses the Doubango open source framework for reassuring compatibility with IMS/SIP functions. For the mobility purposes of the GERYON Control Room, the Android 4.1.2 and Google Maps v2 for Android have been utilized, providing a lightweight implementation. The prototype is fully operational and was demonstrated in different GERYON days and final technical videos, supporting: Login Screen for registering the Control Room operator to IMS, Call Center Screen, location and static/dynamic group calling capabilities.
**Design and development of the GMGW (O2.5)
The GERYON Media Gateway GMGW reference architecture is depicted in the Figure 16. The GMGW is driven by the SIP User Agent that represents the main entry point. The GMGW provides its transcoding capabilities information and instantiates an effective media transcoding session when it receives respectively a SIP INVITE and the related ReINVITE messages from a client (GEMS/GSGW). The Session Manager component creates media transcoding session, which involves several components such as the media Transcoder (RTP transcoding), the Transcoding Engine (control of several Transcoders) and the Monitor, which monitors the session resources and sends the measured data to a Resource Manager in order to allow transcoding related resource allocation and Admission Control (AC).
The other GMGW Service Manager, Profile Manager and Media Gateway Manager components are respectively for the AC, the client rights access and capabilities checking, and the resource availability and transcoding management. More details are provided in the following subsections.
GMGW proof of concept has been completely developed and tested including:
• Implementation of a prototype GMGW structure
• Implementation of the SIP UA for interfacing with GEMS/TMM
o Session initialization (capabilities retrieving)
o Session media capabilities negotiation: based on SIP/SDP offer & answer
• Media transcoding from G.711 to AMR codecs
** Design and development of the SGW (O2.6)
The GSGW functional design and overall procedures to interact with the rest of GERYON elements have been completed. Figure 17 in the publishable summary pdf file shows the block design and, more importantly, a detailed zoom of the procedures involved in cross-ciphering operations, how GEMS requests such operations through a SIP based interface via a dual SDP definition (to map future (S)RTP flows) and how the SGW and the MGW might interact in case additional clear text transcoding is needed. Both KMS and SDES based key exchange modes have been analysed together with e2e, e2ae, e2me interdomain alternatives in 3GPP’s TR 33.828.
According to the design of the GSGW, the Media Controller of the Signalling plane processing node is the interface of the GSGW to any media level transmissions; by utilising the media connection information (e.g. IP addresses and ciphering suites) that is initially provided by the Signalling Controller, the Media Controller can set up connections to provide ciphering interoperability for media security incompatible devices.
The GSGW has been implemented in an open source environment that utilises the version 12.04 TLS of the Ubuntu operating system as the development platform. In addition, a number of open source libraries, including libsocket, libsrtp and libpthread, were utilised for creating several core functionalities of the GSGW, such as, setting up a virtual communication channel between clients, securing the data that travels via the channel and creating concurrent channels for multiple conversations.
A screenshot of when the GEMS invites the GSGW to a call session is illustrated in Figure 18 in the publishable summary pdf file. In the figure, a number of INVITE messages have been sent by the GEMS to the GSGW, enabling the invocation of the GSGW to support a security incompatible media session.
Controller of the GSGW and the GEMS.
** Specify the interfaces of the management modules in the GEMS with the TD-EGS, MGW and SGW (O2.7)
As previously mentioned, all interfaces with GEMS are based on IMS compliant procedures. These have been already completely defined and detailed in D2.2 (check previous Figure 11 for IMS compliance), fully implemented along the project development stages in WP3-5 and demonstrated in WP6. Final demonstration videos, network traces and resulting flow diagrams validate the compliance of GERYON with the 3GPP’s TS.
* TAMS logic research and development (O3)
** Design and implementation of a centralized repository for keeping service requirements and related information (O3.1)
The general structure of information in GERYON XDMS based central repository has been defined together with the RLS/groups mapping mechanisms depicted in Figure 19. Specific details are included in Section 3 of D2.2.
** Research the interactions with the different TD-EGS considered (O3.2)
Following the GERYON approach to specify common interfaces and procedures for border GWs (native TD-EGS and GEGW/TD-EGS), the TAMS logic is fed with common data and interacts with different technologies in a similar way.
• The QoS signalling scheme is common.
• The PNA-driven status information is also shared, although LTE devices may report more detailed information such as battery and QoS status.
• The RTCP proxies in native TD-EGS upload QoS statistics and manages the priority-enabled calls following common procedures.
** Research the effects of alternative communication settings and the acceptance by end users (O3.3)
Toward the completion of this objective, different steps have been already carried out:
• Analysis of the service parameters to cope with the end users’ requirements. Although much literature exists in the area of multimedia services in different contexts, its application to wideband emergency services is limited yet. The available critical mission-oriented studies have been analysed, in order to define the basic service parameters for the GERYON system.
• Several research works have been carried out by different partners to identify the specific relationship of the relevant input parameters towards the overall Quality of Experience (QoE).
• From a general perspective, the audio/audio-visual quality and the energy consumption have been taken into account (see Figure 21 in the publishable summary pdf file). Both features are typically opposite, so trade-off approaches have been proposed.
** To orchestrate the fulfilment of grade of service requirements in a coordinated way (O3.4)
Three areas of decision making have been defined and researched:
TAMS Call Admission Control: When receiving new call establishment requests, TAMS processes the requests through a priority-enabled serving queue. The basic algorithms for implementing the queuing system have been researched, and several tests have been carried out to profile the behavior of the system in different service environments.
TAMS Session Logic: When serving a new session establishment request, TAMS implements the TAMS Session Logic where it proactively reassures the compatibility of the different endpoints at service level (examines if additional service logic needs to be invoked) and media level (codecs, media ciphering and inter-domain QoS signalling).
TAMS Decision Logic: This logic includes all the necessary algorithms to drive the consolidated (re)configuration of the active sessions in order to optimize the performance of the system. The design of this logic takes into account the relevant GERYON characteristics, such as the inter-domain approach (gathering of information from different domains), the configuration of the service parameters at session initialization and during the service lifetime (upon reception of specific QoS-related events).
The core behaviour of TAMS has been designed, identifying the inputs and outputs of the system (as overviewed in the figure 22 in the publishable summary pdf file).
Both quality (NQoS & QoE) and battery related research studies have been based on experimental data, and the proposed logic has been initially evaluated through simulations. D3.3 showed all the research and simulation activities carried out to provide the adaptation intelligence to the TAMS (see an example in Figure 23 in the pdf file).
** To design and develop the internal interfaces and data information flows between TAMS and the different management modules (O3.5)
TAMS use standardised SIP signalling with external management nodes and shared memory and XMLRPC API to exchange information with builtin modules. For the former, Figure 24 in the publishable summary pdf file illustrates the flow diagram of a session initialization, which includes the actions performed by TAMS. Before contacting the callee, some session pre-initialization processes must be carried out. First of all, TAMS interacts with SMM in order to retrieve the media-plane ciphering capabilities supported by GSGW [Step 1]. Then, it contacts TMM and requests the set of media codecs available in GMGW [Step 2]. Next, a verification of the resource availability estimation for both origin and destination networks is performed [Step 3]. This is done through RCM, which stores/handles the network-related SIP events retrieved from different networks in GERYON and can infer estimates on whether a new session with the requested capabilities can be established.
A new session will be inserted in the Active Session Table together with some valuable parameters, such as the session identity, the participants, the priority and/or the status. TAMS could set the status of the session to ‘In-Progress’, so as to indicate that the session establishment procedure has not completed. The data of the Active Session Table repository will be accessible by all sub-modules of GEMS.
Similarly During the Session Adaptation Request Process, TAMS will be in charge of deciding if active sessions have to be adapted or established sessions have to be dropped due to the reception of network-related SIP events. This process may be solicited internally from the TAMS Session Logic or by an external authorized entity (i.e. RCM module and Control Room). As illustrated in Figure 25, in the publishable summary pdf file the interface and operation is the same regardless the origin of the invocation.
Detailed information of depicted interfaces can be found in D3.2.
* GEGW reference GW and TETRA specific pilot GEGW (O4)
** Specification of a reference GEGW and required procedures to interoperate with the rest of IMS based GERYON components (O4.1)
The initial high level design of the reference GEGW considered 4 different TD modules responsible for transcoding, security, GERYON emergency services and identity management. Although these modules will depend on specific technology working modes (i.e. TETRA identity management) the external interfaces will have to deal with the complete GERYON ecosystem. The approach depicted in Figure 26 has been applied for the GEGW reference design and TETRA prototype design and development. Specific mapping to GERYON tasks is included (refer to D4.1-3 for insights of the actual composition of the TETRA GEGW design).
** Design and development of a particular GEGW for TETRA (O4.2)
A preliminary analysis of the reference GEGW showed that some core functionalities would not be technology dependant or, at least, they could be easily translated to multiple technologies. Upon this idea, embedded in the design of the TETRA prototype a technology independent core was designed, developed and tested. In particular the GEGW TD-EGS’s design has significantly advanced, far beyond initial expectations. This design involves different internal processes intercommunicated by TCP/IP sockets (in order to guarantee future scalability), implementation of GWCOMP multitechnology core language and different parsers to TETRA and SIP (see an excerpt in Figure 27 in the publishable summary pdf file).
All the designs of the GEGW implemented from scratch leading to the following figures:
Number of lines of code 175.000 lines
Number of VISIO diagrams Over 100 diagrams
Number of pages of design and internal specifications Over 1.000 pages
* GERYON clients (O5)
** Specification of client requirements and security limitations (O5.1)
The client requirements vary depending of the type of terminal and services they can access to. There are four types of terminals defined as to be developed in GERYON:
• GERYON terminal for “red button” users, which allows quick access to GERYON NG112 services and ensures the provision of basic location information.
• GERYON terminal for emergency professional users, which supports all the required application-level signalling for the set of GERYON PMR-grade services and ensures the provision of basic location information.
Apart from the overall 3GPP (and related IETF’s RFCs) specification the following ones were comprehensively analysed and reported in D2.2:
Standard Scope Purpose
RFC 3711 RTP/SAVP profile Security capabilities for media plane (end-to-end and SGW)
RFC 4568 Session Description Protocol (SDP) Security Capability Negotiation Use of SDES for media plane encryption (end-to-end and SGW)
RFC 5939 Session Description Protocol (SDP) Security Capability Negotiation
Crypto attribute (end-to-end and SGW)
RFC 6043 Session Description Protocol (SDP) Security Capability Negotiation Use of KMS for media plane encryption (end-to-end and SGW)
RFC 5027 Session Description Protocol (SDP) Security Capability Negotiation Use of security preconditions - not adopted by 3GPP (end-to-end and SGW)
RFC 4585 RTP/AVPF profile RTCP feeback (end-to-end, RCM, TD-EGS)
RFC 3605 Real Time Control Protocol (RTCP) attribute in Session Description Protocol (SDP) For RCM oriented feedback
RFC 3611 RTP Control Protocol Extended Reports (RTCP XR) For RCM oriented feedback
RFC 6035 SIP-based VoIP QoS feedback For RCM oriented feedback
RFC 4119 A Presence-based GEOPRIV Location Object Format Location notification to local (domain) presence server
RFC 5985 HELD: HTTP-based location provision, by value and by reference Possible alternative for TD-EGS and LRF nodes (LIS function)
RFC 5222 LOST: Location-to-Service Translation Protocol Possible alternative for LRF nodes (RDF function)
RFC 4412 SIP-based session-level prioritisation, including emergency organisations Use of "Resource-Priority" and "Accept-Resource-Priority" SIP headers for endpoints, TD-EGS, RCM
RFC 3725 Best practices for 3PCC operations Possible logic for GEMS operation
RFC 4117 Invocation of transcoding services from SIP-based 3PCC Possible interface between GEMS and MGW
** Design and development of GERYON sw client to support basic IMS communications (O5.2)
Among others, Android based open source IMSDroid IMS client was selected. Default parameters specific for GERYON were enabled such as presence parameters after porting the missing functionalities. The generic GERYON IMS LTE architecture was reported in D5.3 and is depicted in Figure 29 in the publishable summary pdf file.
The application layer of the architecture contains the functional modules for which GERYON basic and enhanced services are implemented. This layer is where the SIP and Media Stacks reside.
The SIP Stack is based on Doubango Framework in which there are 6 Stack states, DISCONNECTED. Figure 30 depicts the SIP Stack states which are deployed in NgnSipStack class.
The general GERYON client SW is denoted as GDroid. The Gdroid environment/initial implementation has been iteratively tested in different Android HW devices. The Figures 31-34 in the publishable summary pdf file illustrate the implemented/added features.
** Design and development of specific UI to launch the emergency communications (O5.3)
From the Gdroid implementation, three different client profiles have been implemented: Red-buttton, NGN112 and Professional profiles:
Additionally a specific version of the client for ambulances has been tailored in order to address End Users’ specific requirements and show how the designed ecosystem to provide allows the quick development of new enriched application.
* Emergency services support in 4G LTE network (O6)
**Review of standardisation activities related to LTE emergency communications (O6.1)
Different Technical Specifications and Technical Recommendations (TSs and TRs) by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) include specific references to emergency communications in LTE. A comprehensive and up to date SotA revision was carried out in order to collect latest “emergency-LTE” standardization efforts that might have an impact into GERYON approach. Moreover, the supervision of the 3GPP’s activity on LTE was maintained during the whole project as a part of WP7 standardisation activities. Therefore, the SotA was not only reported in D2.1 but also in related D7.2 and D7.4 (see for example an update included in D7.4 in Table 4 in the publishable summary pdf file).
** Specification of IMS-driven LTE emergency communications (O6.2)
Since, at the beginning of the project there were no commercial LTE networks available the following preliminary tasks were accomplished to specify LTE characteristics for GERYON emergency communications:
• An LTE emulated system (Aeroflex 7100 LTE Digital Radio Test Set) was integrated with an IMS pilot. Testing of LTE connectivity between an IMS client (at laptop) and IMS infrastructure as well as testing of the impact of different configuration parameters on the quality of emergency communications.
• Implementation of LTE testbed and conduction of initial trials for the verification of proper operation and familiarization with LTE technology (excluding emergency calls (VoIP), since they could not be supported by the pilot platform). Test cases and results are included in D5.1 (M12).
• Investigation of prerequisites/challenges, etc. related to the LTE site deployment in the context of GERYON.
** Design and development of LTE TD-EGS (O6.3)
In order to define the internal composition of the LTE TD-EGS the following activities were carried out, leading to the designed depicted in Figure 40 in the publishable summary pdf file.
• Identification of the LTE TD-EGS functional (TD-EGS, TI-SIP, TD-Logic), non-functional and installation requirements.
• Identification of key TD-EGS functionalities, including: the Presence Agent, the Location module, the Network status module, the QoS Agent and the MPTY Agent.
• Design of TD-EGS at elements'/SW modules' level, including: XML Database, Active Sessions Table, Presence Network Agent, Watchers, RTCP Proxy, CellID to Location, Session Management Module (SMM) (supporting conference group call and push-to-talk individual/group call), Identity Translation, QoS Assignment, Group Call Management (GCM) and Network Event Extraction (NEE).
• Analysis of the integration of TD-EGS into Open IMS Core and investigation of alternatives regarding the implementation of TD-EGS SIP call control and presence functions.
** Testing and validation of the proposed IMS-driven LTE emergency communications (O6.4)
The GERYON Basic and Enhanced Services have been deplgoyed over the GERYON testbed and validated from a technical and operational point of view.
GERYON Basic Services involve 4G-TETRA interoperability for different types of voice communications. The outcomes of the validation were reported in GERYON D6.1. GERYON Enhanced Services involve 4G-driven media-enriched emergency services. The outcomes of the validation were reported in GERYON D6.2.
All the resulting experimental traces have been uploaded to a unified web site:
http://www.sec-geryon.eu/protected_area/D6.1_callflow.php
http://www.sec-geryon.eu/protected_area/D62/D6.2_callflow.php
Additionally, some performance evaluation analysis over the GERYON testbed has been performed and reported in GERYON D6.3. Table 5 in the publishable summary pdf file illustrates some collected times obtained in group half duplex call (PoC) tests for the different connection technologies.
Potential Impact:
NOTE:
Due to the number of tables and summary figures the reader is strongly encouraged to refer to the attached pdf file for confortable review.
The socio-economical impact of the GERYON outcomes can be analyzed based on the main GERYON innovations.
The main innovation of the project resides in the solution provided for the integration of heterogeneous mission critical networks under a common IMS-based platform, using an all-IP approach for both data and control planes. In detail, the following innovations are expected to have an impact in the society.
GERYON innovation
The GERYON architecture is based on Open Standards. The whole GERYON solution is based on Open Standards, primarily on the 3GPP IMS architecture. In our opinion, this feature endows the GERYON solution with a competitive advantage over other proposed, IP-based solutions. In this sense, the GERYON solution could be easily adopted by the relevant SDOs.
◊ Together with the fact that the GERYON procedures are designed based on open standards, and specifically on IMS as the prevalent candidate for future 4G networks, we believe that GERYON will provide a good basis for future Public Safety communication systems interoperability.
◊ Additionally, the GERYON solution takes into account the IP-based next generation communication recommendations between citizens and first responders (e.g. NG112 / NG911). Solutions and procedures have been designed to interconnect both worlds in a secure and reliable scheme. The benefits of including multimedia material in the management of emergencies is recognized by all the stakeholders (vendors, operators, end users…). Similarly, an enhanced communication between citizens and authorities will undoubtedly benefit the society with a better response to emergency calls.
Although these facts are not directly associated to the GERYON project, GERYON served as a demonstration platform of these novel services over currently deployed networks.
More specific to the GERYON outcomes, the proposed interoperability framework where all the agents involved in emergency situations is a missing feature in the current design of next generation emergency networks. NG112/NG911 systems are being specified independently of NG Public Safety networks. This fact may compromise the correct interoperability of citizen-to-authority and authority -to-authority communications in the future.
GERYON has shown the benefits of a coordinated communications framework, and thus has been recognized by end users and involved stakeholders.
The GERYON architecture has been designed taking into account the organizational standpoint in order to solve the interoperability problems typically associated to this kind of emergency organizations. More specifically:
◊ The GERYON approach enables a third-party reliable organization to mediate the emergency communications between different professional organizations.
◊ GERYON facilitates the communications and interoperability among different networks, organizations and users employing different technologies, while assuring the individual self-control of each organization communications, without preventing each user group from offering its own communications services. The concept of third party mediation agency seems relevant in different scenarios, from small scale multi-organization regional/national public operators to large-scale international agencies for cross-frontier crisis management.
Currently, upon big emergency situations, responder organizations should have previously agreed and configured the way emergency communications happen. It is interesting to deploy such type of reliable intermediation agent that assures the interoperability without need for previous peer-to-peer agreements between all the organizations.
The concept has been presented in different forums (including ITU-T) with initial positive feedbacks.
At the same time, emergency end users pointed out the requirement to keep autonomy in the management of resources. In that sense, the GERYON “push model” assures a distributed self-management by each organization for a common orchestrated communication framework.
The GERYON architecture allows for scalable interoperability procedures.
◊ The GERYON solution specifies a series of standard-based common procedures (protocols and data sets) to communicate any emergency domain with the GERYON domain.
The Basic Services enable the provision of traditional emergency services in modern IP-based networks. The Emergency Services make it possible for the first responders to receive invaluable information (e.g. photos/videos from the incident, location of the person in need) in order to react with more efficiency.
◊ All these procedures are designed in a per-organization basis, with a scalable approach. This means that all the services can be provided over current technologies, while they are also ready for adoption by future technologies (e.g. Public Safety LTE) without any specific requirement of modifying the common inter-domain procedures. In the current situation, some stakeholders are pushing for a quick adoption of the new wave of 4G technologies for Public Safety while other well-established agents are more conservative.
The GERYON solution is presented and recognized as a good solution for the transient period, since interoperability and coexistence are implemented based on standard procedures that will probably be in line with the future standardisations and developments.
Therefore, GERYON will foster the adoption of these new 4G technologies for specific emergency services, at the same time that a smooth and scalable transition can be made, guaranteeing that the current investments are not lost in the future.
The GERYON solution moves the advanced communications management to the network:
◊ The GERYON core (GEMS) implements most of the complex multi-organization procedures in a 3PCC-driven approach.
◊ Standard and simple interfaces are provided to manage the GERYON services. The GERYON 3PCC management approach, jointly to the fact that GERYON core services can be run in a virtualized way in the network, enables easy to access interoperability communications.
Once the technical issues and protocol details are solved by the core system, third parties could use these interfaces to develop specialized management interfaces for different agents (e.g. Control Rooms, vehicle devices, etc.).
This would benefit the activity of new companies specialized in the media-enriched interfaces since complex technical details are hidden to them.
Table 6: GERYON socio-economical impact
Concerning the potential impact for GERYON partners, the compliance of GERYON solutions with existing LTE/TETRA and IMS/SIP standards and their adoption for emergency service provisioning/delivery are the strong points addressed by the consortium, and then helping for new business opportunities. GERYON’s potential business contributions to markets have been identified. The GERYON consortium partners have proposed several business cases and related exploitation strategies to push GERYON based solutions/services/products to markets.
The Mobile Network Operator Business Case
In the context of GERYON project various possible scenarios of GERYON or similar public safety systems/services provision have been explored. From these it has been deduced that the MNO’s role in the value chain can be summarized in the following candidate business models:
Model 1: A first responder (FR) entity or a private mobile radio communications operator (PMR) deploys a public safety LTE network. In this case, the role of the mobile network operator is undertaken by the FR entity or the PMR. The FR entity can be a municipality (as in the US initial deployments) deploying a local or metropolitan area network over which only public safety services and possibly services related to the FR entity activities are provided. The role of the mobile operator can be restricted in consulting services regarding the radio network deployment, and probably on the establishment of specific national roaming agreements for the places where the LTE network of the PMR or FR entity is lacking coverage or resources. Specific legislation is enforced by the state.
Model 2: The long established mobile network operators deploy a public safety LTE network and provide communication services to first responders. In this case, the mobile network operator holds the traditional role of communication services provisioning, with the following key differences: the LTE mobile network is only dedicated to public safety communications, and the customers for this network are only first responders, and possibly selected end-users. The services provided from the mobile network operator to first responders are controlled by specific SLAs and security agreements, while specific security agreements and legislation can be enforced by the state. Indicatively, the mobile network operator could deploy this dedicated public safety network using any unused frequency spectrum (e.g. TDD spectrum in conventional 900/1800/2100 MHz bands or dedicated 700 MHz spectrum).
Model 3: The long established mobile network operators deploy a public mobile LTE network for the provision of commercial communication services and it is interconnected to first responders' offices, PSAPs and/or PMRs. In this case, the mobile network operator plays the traditional role of provisioning communication services and supporting emergency services based on national and international legislation. This is the business model that is followed currently in all European countries and for all network operators. The mobile operators' responsibility is limited to the interconnection of end users with first responders in the areas where service is available (e.g. LTE coverage). Specific security agreements and legislation is enforced by the state.
It shall be admitted that in the first model, the role of the mobile network operator is undertaken by other entities, while in the third, the economic revenues are marginal and depend highly on the business model, the identity of the end-users (e.g. private security services, public first responders, end-users) and the mobile operator agreements. On the other hand, depending on national legislation no charging can be enforced on public safety services, at least for primitive voice call and message services; while it is usually mandatory for mobile network operators to provide emergency communications both from the regulatory and legislation perspective and in the context of the mobile operators Corporate Social Responsibility activities. On the other hand the second model requires high capital expenses and implies the use of specific terminals (e.g. TDD compliant and/or compatible with selected Public Safety spectrum band); other than the massively available for commercial mobile communication. This fact renders the second model not preferable from the mobile network operator's perspective and even more importantly, inconsistent with the basic GERYON concept for all-in-one terminal services provisioning. To conclude, (marginal) new economic revenue streams could be expected only in the third model addressing specific communication needs of first responders with third parties. Therefore, the only profitable business case for the mobile operator can be the one described by the third model.
Strengths Weaknesses
◊ Market experience and knowledge of user requirements at critical situations: COSMOTE has a long-life experience with the provision of communication services at critical situations.
◊ Cutting-edge LTE infrastructure: COSMOTE is the leading mobile operator in Greece, having an impressive record of very important market firsts. In addition, COSMOTE’s LTE (4G) network is continuously expanding covering so far 55 areas, including the largest cities and the most important tourist places.
◊ Large customer base: COSMOTE is the leading mobile operator in Greece possessing the greatest market share (almost 50%). ◊ Difficulties or lack of communication between first responder services/emergency agencies due to the lack of organisational/structural communication procedures.
◊ Current global economic crisis situation: lack of economic resources in Greece for new investments especially from the public sector emergency agencies.
•
Opportunities Threats
◊ GERYON technological approach (LTE/IMS based) is in line with:
• major providers solutions and technology trends regarding the use of IMS
• the forthcoming standardisation –regarding the use of LTE as the standards for mobile broadband emergency services-
• COSMOTE’s strategy to follow the 3GPP LTE technology path for the provision of next generation mobile broadband services.
◊ Increasing end user interest for private security and public emergency services:
◊ GERYON project impact in different TETRA and Critical Communications forums. Many providers have shown their interest in the GERYON concept.
◊ Marginal increase in COSMOTE revenues by providing GERYON enriched services over LTE to specific private security agencies.
◊ Possibility of new strategic agreements/partnership with public and/or private security agencies. ◊ A sluggish economy: Due to the current general economic landscape in Greece, many companies are reluctant to invest on new infrastructure.
◊ Regulatory environment: government regulations on the telecommunications industry may imply that COSMOTE is obliged to offer advanced emergency services and high capacity for security/emergency communications without any economical benefit.
•
Table 7: SWOT analysis: The Mobile Network Operator Business Case
The Public TETRA Operator Business Case
ITELAZPI currently provides advanced, secure and reliable TETRA solutions to various professional public services such as municipal police, fire brigades, public transport organisations, public work squads, ambulances, etc. In line with the latest technology developments, TETRA users are required to communicate with commercial voice and data networks of different nature (fixed telephony users, GSM/3G services and Internet applications); and it is envisaged that the demand to integrate with next generation fixed and mobile networks such as LTE and Wimax will significantly increase in the short term.
Therefore, GERYON project gives ITELAZPI an interesting opportunity to explore other challenges and assess the different options to converge the existing networks and solutions with the latest TETRA, LTE and IMS infrastructures with the aim to provide with more enhanced and developed emergency services.
The business models outlined as a result of a first analysis are:
Model 1: Private network: make commercial mobile networks fit for purpose for mission critical users. That would mean network operators investing significant amounts in their infrastructure.
Model 2: Public network: ITEL (Government) organisation owns the network and provides Broadband services to mission critical users. Requires spectrum allocation by the public organisations, and competition laws will also have to be revised.
Model 3: Shared/Hybrid model, by means of public-private partnership models. Use existing TETRA network owned and managed by ITEL and complement it with a commercial private broadband services provided by operators. Minimizes the required CAPEX and protects the existing investments in narrowband TETRA.
However, this initial business plan options require further analysis in depth, and are subject to change, and will be reviewed in agreement to the market evolution and the local operator LTE plans (when region-wide coverage is reached)
Strengths Weaknesses
◊ Market experience and user requirement know- how: ITEL is a respected brand name among Basque public administration end users.
◊ Cutting-edge TETRA infrastructure: ITEL owns a well-established region wide infrastructure. This is a major advantage because it enables to capture new customers and for its characteristics it provides an easy adaptation to LTE/IMS.
◊ Valued customer service: proven by ITEL’s good results in customer satisfaction surveys. ◊ Late adoption of 4G-LTE from Spanish mobile operators – lack of a commercially available region-wide LTE network from local mobile operators, that would enable a GERYON enabled services to current customers in the Basque Country.
◊ Current global economic crisis situation: lack of economic resources in Basque Public Administration for new investments (that affects both to ITEL and end users).
•
Opportunities Threats
◊ New technology – GERYON technological approach (IMS based) is in line with major providers solutions and technology trends (Public Safety LTE US for instance).
◊ Increasing end user interest: many of ITEL’s current end users value the added services a combined TETRA-LTE solution via GERYON could provide.
◊ GERYON project impact in different TETRA and Critical Communications forums. Many providers have shown their interest in the GERYON concept.
◊ Increase in ITEL revenues by providing converged TETRA+ LTE GERYON enriched services.
◊ Possibility of new strategic agreements/partnership with LTE providers. ◊ A sluggish economy.
◊ Regulatory environment: increased government regulations within the telecommunications industry. Spanish Market and Competence National Commission (CNMC) new directives/guidelines regarding ITEL Business Model oriented to a LTE+PMR market segment may set restrictions for ITEL to provide converged services.
◊ LTE spectrum issue not clarified.
◊ ITELAZPI’s future as a public company: many political proposals to adjust/tighten public companies network in Basque Administration
•
Table 8: SWOT analysis: The Public TETRA Operator Business Case
Over-The-Top Specialized Emergency Service Provider
The exploitation opportunities of the different solutions identified in the “Specialized Emergency Service Provider” section are decoupled of the actual network connectivity. This business model is focused on the deployment and maintenance of the service layer, offering additional capabilities over the “raw” data plans contracted by professional end users.
Thus, the scope and possible impact of the marketable solutions are different taking into account different potential target sectors:
Service Model 1: Integral solution including the multi-domain core services, the future commercial-grade PSCC and 4GAPS nodes. The target customers would be big clients such as administration or mobile network operators, with a portfolio of multiple target Public Safety organizations with interoperability needs. This business case could be linked to the Business Model 2 of the “Mobile Network Operator” section, aimed at aiding in the implementation of mission-critical services over commercial data connections. Depending on the MNO infrastructure, the value added product could be either the expertise in the organizational aspects and specific emergency services, or the deployment of specific PSCC / 4GAPS nodes depending on the needs.
Service Model 2:Deployment of specific PSCC / 4GAPS, based on value added capabilities such as group communications, QoS management or enhanced location services. Stakeholders planning deployments related to next generation IP-based emergency networks may be interested on incorporating different aspects of this set of capabilities.
Service Model 3:Targeting small scope organizations, which may be interested in transition models towards IP-based services to enhance their daily emergency operations. This type of users (e.g. local administrations, municipalities, small ambulance companies, etc.) may want to exploit their data plans for a enhanced location or multimedia-enabled services in an integrated way. The solutions proposed and validated in the scope of the GERYON project have raised interest in different sectors.
These different business models have been identified and preliminary explored. The leading partner of these marketable solutions is UPV/EHU. Although these products could be sold as independent modules for OTT service provisioning, joint ventures with other GERYON partners would be required in order to provide more complete solutions or to offer specific functionalities: service provisioning coupled with MNO infrastructures, interoperability with deployed TETRA infrastructures, transcoding / cross-ciphering services, displaying-management interfaces, specific emergency Application Servers, etc.
Strengths Weaknesses
◊ Completely compatible IMS approach: An IMS-based compatibility makes possible the adaptation to different commercial IMS solutions.
◊ Enabler for interoperability systems based on a confidence entity (“any-to-one peering” concept).
◊ Generic design of emergency services over IMS.
◊ Aligned with industry movements towards VoLTE in the U.S. and U.K. ◊ License: Originally focused on open source solutions leading cores to be commercialized as service and not as product. At first it is proposed as a virtualized service to be included in the all-in-one solution (when no commercial IMS core already available).
◊ Stability: Its stability should be comprehensively assessed so as to be a marketable product.
◊ Awareness of end users: From the feedback obtained, contacted possible end users are initially attracted by the concept of emergency services provision over commercial mobile networks, but there is still a lack of a climate with enough confidence to dissociate them from the traditional PMR networks.
Opportunities Threats
◊ Provision of emergency services based on standardised commercial cellular technologies, with the approaches of the provision of scalable OTT services:
• Interesting for end users in crisis time.
• It avoids temporal solutions that vary with the new specifications of standardization organisms or with the commercial offer of the vendors.
◊ Both as a product but specially as an engineering outcome: There is a necessity of transmitting it to stakeholders, administration, etc. ◊ Competence/reputation.
• There exist solutions to deploy IMS services in infrastructure or cloud.
• It is necessary to have interviews with stakeholders, presentations, exhibitions, etc.
◊ Standardization trends: The 3GPP is focused on the incorporation of Public Safety capabilities in LTE; a direction change could happen. It seems that the management of services will be based on the IMS architecture to some extent.
•
Table 9: SWOT analysis: Over-The-Top Specialized Emergency Service Provider
4.2. Main dissemination activities
Dissemination is essential to the success of a project through making relevant stakeholders aware of the existence, purpose and achievement of a project. In order to present the GERYON project to a broad range of stakeholders (e.g. researchers, the general public, first responders and market vendors), various channels of dissemination have been utilised during the project life time (i.e. 01 December 2011 – 31 May 2013). In this section, an overview of all dissemination methods that were employed by the GERYON consortium and their results will be presented.
With the purpose of ensuring the GERYON project is well disseminated, many approaches have been utilised during the entire 30-month of the project period and a fruitful set of outcomes have been achieved. In general, three main methods were utilised for the dissemination activities and their results are listed as below:
• Publications
o 4 press releases,
o 16 published articles,
o 21 papers (including 4 journal papers and 17 conference papers),
• Dissemination tools
o 1 general leaflet was created and it has been distributed in various end-user meetings, events and workshops,
o Specific leaflets created for attended events,
o 5 GERYON newsletters with a total of 291 downloads,
o 1 project website (including both public and private sections),
o 1 GERYON YouTube Channel, containing 11 videos with 652 of viewings,
• Dissemination events
o GERYON was presented in 4 different major international industrial events
o 1 international academic workshop
• GERYON days in Greece, Spain and the UK
In addition to the aforementioned results, other dissemination outcomes were also obtained by the GERYON consortium members, including interviews, presentations, liaison activities with other related projects and seminars. All of the dissemination results will be detailed in the following chapters.
4.2.1. Publications: Press Releases and Articles
In order to introduce the GERYON project to various stakeholders, the press release method was chosen by the consortium as its effectiveness and directness. With the aim of announcing the start of the GERYON project and presenting the background and concept of the project to the general public, research communities, first responders and industry leaders. Four press releases were published by members of the consortium via their official press offices, websites and newsletters from the beginning of 2012.
Figure 43: Screenshots of the GERYON press releases
Articles are very flexible as they can be tailored for special audience if needed. This flexibility allows the dissemination to be reached to varying but specific stakeholders. Based upon the foundation laid by the GERYON press releases, a total of 16 articles are composed and published in popular presses including national and regional newspapers, emergency services related journals and industrial special issues.
Figure 44: A selection of screenshots of the GERYON published articles
4.2.2. Scientific Papers
Journal papers:
• Fidel Liberal, Ianire Taboada, and Jose-Oscar Fajardo, “Dealing with Energy-QoE Trade-Offs in Mobile Video” Journal of Computer Networks and Communications, vol. 2013, Article ID 412491, 12 pages, 2013. doi:10.1155/2013/412491
• Is-Haka Mkwawa and Lingfen Sun, “Battery Voltage Discharge Rate Prediction and Video Content Adaptation in Mobile Devices over 3G Access Networks”, Journal of ZTE Communications March 2013 Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 44-50
• Jose Oscar Fajardo, Ianire Taboada, Fidel Liberal, "Cross-layer cross-domain adaptation of mobile video services", ICST Transactions on Mobile Communications and Applications, July-September 2012, Volume 12, Issue 7-9, e4, pp. 1-11
• Jose Oscar Fajardo, Fidel Liberal, Fudong Li, Nathan Clarke, Is-Haka Mkwawa, “End-to-middle-to-end solution for IMS media plane security”, Electronic Commerce Research (Springer). [accepted]
Relevant conference papers:
• F. Liberal, J. O. Fajardo, M. Ramos, H. Koumaras, Ch. Sakkas, M. A. Kourtis, "An IMS-based Interoperable Architecture for Heterogeneous Emergency Services", IEEE International Conference on Telecommunications and Multimedia (TEMU), Crete, Greece, 28-30 July 2014
• Fidel Liberal, Jose Oscar Fajardo, Naiara Goia, Ioanna Mesogiti, "Global standards, the key enablers for deploying next generation emergency communications networks", ITU Kaleidoscope 2014 - Living in a converged world - impossible without standards, 3-5 June 2014, Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation. [
• Louis Anegekuh, Lingfen Sun and Emmanuel Ifeachor, "Encoded Bitstream based Video Content Type Definition for HEVC Video Quality Prediction”, IEEE ICC 2014, 10-14 June, 2014, Sydney, Australia
• Jose Oscar Fajardo, Fidel Liberal, Fudong Li, Nathan Clarke, Is-Haka Mkwawa, Lingfen Sun, “Performance-driven Evaluation for Deploying IMS-based Interoperability Scenarios”, IEEE ICC 2014 – NGN (Next-Generation Networking Symposium), 10-14 June 2014, Sydney, Australia
• Jose Oscar Fajardo, Fidel Liberal, Is-Haka Mkwawa, Lingfen Sun, “Autonomous Adaptation Strategies for Multiuser Multimedia Transmissions in the LTE Uplink”, IEEE ICC 2014 – CSSMA (Communications Software, Services and Multimedia Applications Symposium), 10-14 June 2014, Sydney, Australia.
• Harilaos Koumaras, Christos Sakkas, Michail Alexandros Kourtis, Jose Oscar Fajardo, Fidel Liberal, "CC4IMS: A Mobile-based Open-Source Call Center for IMS", 2013 IEEE 24th International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications: Services, Applications and Business Track 8-11 September 2013, London, UK
• Fudong Li, Nathan Clarke, Steven Furnell, "A Technology Independent Security Gateway for Real-Time Multimedia Communication", The 7th International Conference on Network and System Security (NSS 2013), pp. 14-25, 3-4 June 2013, Madrid, Spain
• Ali Alfayly, Is-Haka Mkwawa, Lingfen Sun and Emmanuel Ifeachor, "QoE-based Performance Evaluation of Scheduling Algorithms over LTE", IEEE Globecom 2012, Workshop: Quality of Experience for Multimedia Communications (GC'12 Workshop - QoEMC), 03-07 December 2012, Disney Resort Destinations Anaheim, CA, USA
• Is-Haka Mkwawa and Lingfen Sun, "Power-Driven VoIP Quality Adaptation Over WLAN in Mobile Devices", IEEE Globecom 2012, Workshop: Quality of Experience for Multimedia Communications (GC'12 Workshop - QoEMC), 03-07 December 2012, Disney Resort Destinations Anaheim, CA, USA
• Is-Haka Mkwawa, Emmanuel Jammeh, Lingfen Sun, "Mapping of Received Signal Strength Indicator to QoE in VoIP Applications in WLAN", QoMEX 2012, , 5 – 7 July 2012, Yarra Valley, Australia
4.2.3. Dissemination Tools
With the purpose of disseminating the GERYON project both internally and externally, a number of dissemination tools are employed by the consortium, including a GERYON leaflet, GERYON newsletters, a public GERYON website and a GERYON YouTube channel.
The leaflet and newsletters are utilised to present generic project information (e.g. overview and updates) to the public domain in an easy understanding way. Ten videos, containing detailed project outcomes, can be accessed via the public GERYON YouTube channel. The usage of the project website is two-fold: a public facing website allows Internet users to access all project related information while a private website hosts sensitive project data that is only accessible by project partners and project reviewers.
Figure 45: GERYON website: and YouTube channel
4.2.4. Dissemination Events
Events (e.g. industrial exhibitions, conference and workshops) bring different stakeholders with the same interesting together to showcase latest technology to the public. With the aim of meeting other people in the emergency communication domain, the GERYON consortium takes the project into public for a number of times, including:
• Stand at the BAPCO 2013 exhibition and the EENA Conference 2014.
• Oral presentation at Critical Communications World 2013.
• Organising the GERYON ETS 2013 workshop (research oriented conference)
• Hosting GERYON Days in three European countries (i.e. Greece, Spain and the UK) to present GERYON achievements to end-users.
Figure 46: GERYON stands at BAPCO 2013 and EENA Conference 2014
4.2.5. Other Dissemination Activities
In addition to the aforementioned dissemination achievements presented, some other dissemination activities were also carried out by the GERYON consortium, including conducting interviews on radio and TV, presenting presentations in conferences, establishing liaison activities with other projects and hosting seminars.
4.3. Exploitation of results
To the date, the direct exploitation of results have been limited to scientific and standardisation outcomes.
Concerning commercial exploitation, there are several running initiatives mainly derived from the interactions with end users in the last phase of the project. Several end users have requested additional meetings to present the GERYON solution to them and to perform demonstrations at their premises.
In the future, the industrial members of the GERYON consortium intend not only to adopt and exploit the project outputs in their business strategies, but also to promote the GERYON novel communications framework and the related solutions.
Not only the industrial partners but also the academia have deeply explored the possibilities of the exploitation of the results.
• Further marketization, knowledge transference possibilities and joint ventures schemes have been comprehensively analysed.
• The joint participation by EHU, UoP and CYS to the U.K. Home Office ESMCP program is also a good example of the commitment of the partners towards turning GERYON outcomes into commercially viable products
List of Websites:
www.sec-geryon.eu
Coordinator Dr. Fidel Liberal
University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)
Faculty of Engineering of Bilbao (Spain)
Email: fidel.liberal@ehu.es
Phone: + 34 94 601 4129
