Enhancing the QoS and Resource Management Aspects of the 3GPP IMS Emergency Service Architecture

Emergency sessions are the most fundamental and critical services offered by telecommunications networks. They require preferential treatment over regular sessions and this is achieved with QoS and resource management techniques. An IMS emergency service architecture has been proposed by 3GPP. However, this solution only provides preferential treatment to public-initiated emergency communications. It does not offer any special treatment to mission critical calls, PSAP callbacks, and urgent communications among citizens. Furthermore, the preferential treatment offered does not provide public-initiated emergency sessions with a prioritized access to the resources at the transport layer. This may lead to unacceptable emergency sessions´ setup delays and even emergency sessions failures when there is a strong contention for transport resources. This paper tackles these issues by extending the existing 3GPP architecture. We introduce new QoS profiles for emergency sessions, and propose mechanisms for supporting them. We have also built a proof of concept prototype. Its main features are presented.