Broadband
Wireless Telecommunications for Disaster Management
A testbed
for High-Speed "End-to-End" Communications in Support
of Comprehensive Emergency Management (CEM)
A testbed
for high-bandwidth "end-to-end" communications in support
of comprehensive emergency management (CEM) planning and operations
is being established. The team brings the support and endorsement
of two (2) Federal agencies who are major participants in the comprehensive
emergency management community. They are the Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA) and the National Guard Bureau (NGB). As the project
progresses, the R&D objectives are expected to attract significant
interest and involvement from state and local government agencies,
and ultimately the 27 other federal agencies and the American Red
Cross that comprise the Federal Response Plan (FRP). The R&D
objectives have been specifically structured to address key underlying
issues at the "intersection" of the academic R&D community
with the real-world government emergency management environment.
The
team is headed by the Center for Wireless Telecommunications at
Virginia Tech and includes Science Applications International Corporation
(SAIC), Global Broadband Solutions (GBS), and Old Dominion University.
Team members are currently responsible for planning and developing
FEMA's information and network technology architecture. It is noteworthy
that the FEMA IT Architecture is closely aligned with the overall
goals and objectives of the NSF Digital Government Program. Essential
elements of the proposal include the following:
The
testbed will be a platform for experimentation for advanced IT and
networking technologies in support of comprehensive emergency management
that simply does not exist today anywhere across the United States.
The testbed will help set the standard for providing high-bandwidth
networking and communication support to the emergency management
community.
The
testbed will be open to experimentation from other Digital Government
awardees as well as members of the CEM community at local, state,
tribal, and federal levels. To the maximum extent practicable, the
testbed will be founded on open architecture principles, consistent
with the FEMA IT Architecture.
The
testbed will support "end-to-end" information exchange
at DS-3 speeds with scalability up to higher speeds (e.g., OC-192
with WDM) as the funding and business case dictate.
Within
the testbed, "end-to-end" communications capability will
include developing and demonstrating a novel, flexible, and rapidly-deployable
"last-mile" broadband wireless network based upon LMDS
appropriate to first responders in the field and to FEMA Emergency
Response Team (ERT) personnel. The deployable, broadband wireless
technology that will be developed is expected to be of keen interest
to the NGB, the Department of Justice, state/local police and fire
authorities, and the FBI for various law enforcement scenarios and
crises.
In
an "end-to-end" sense, the testbed will also include provisions
for establishment of the first ever Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)
for FEMA with state and local governments and with other federal
agencies as part of the Federal Response Plan (FRP) and the disaster
declamation process.
The
high-bandwidth wireless and VPN capabilities that the Virginia Tech
team proposes to develop do not exist today, yet are viewed as a
critical future part of the FEMA IT Architecture. As the project
progresses, the Virginia Tech team envisions supporting and demonstrating
a bandwidth-intensive telepresence exercise where a first responder
or FEMA ERT person, armed with a wireless LMDS- capable personal
unit (that the team will develop) can literally send and retrieve
emergency management information (including integrated voice, video,
and data) to/from all levels of government including state, local,
and federal (up to and potentially including the president).
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