Call for Papers Special Session on “Rich-Media Emergency Communications for Future Internet”

In an effort to cope with the rapidly increasing demand for continuous multimedia communications anywhere, anytime and with any device, Network Operators are trading legacy technologies for broadband All-IP based services that allow among others, immersive rich services, efficient and flexible architectures, as well as, improved user satisfaction and perceived Quality of Experience (QoE). Obviously, this transition affects current circuit-switched based emergency systems, which are obligatory by 2020 to migrate to packet-switched networks and fulfil the corresponding Next Generation Networks (NGN) regulatory requirements. As NGNs will be replacing the current telecommunication networks, it follows that the current emergency systems need to be upgraded as well in order to fulfil the NGN regulatory requirements in terms of emergency services. Consequently, next generation emergency services will be required to integrate rich-media emergency calls (i.e., combining voice, video and real-time text) over IMS/SIP architectures. Furthermore, health and environmental monitoring sensor data, IoT infrastructures, social media interaction and extensions to eCall supporting NGN are needed for improving the coordination and awareness of the emergency call centres and first responders. Towards this end, new paradigms for distributed emergency management and decision-making are required in order to minimise the response times, improve the efficiency of emergency resources allocation, and optimise the outcome in cases of emergencies.
The Special Session will solicit papers on topics including but not limited to:
  • Network Architectures for Emergency Communications and Management
  • System Architectures for Emergency Communications and Management 
  • Sensor networks and data for Emergency Services and Management
  • Performance evaluation of eHealth sensor platforms
  • Augmentative and Alternative Communication, motor disabled Assistive Technology applications for Emergency Services
  • Self-organized networks for Emergency Communications and Management
  • WebRTC and Emergency Services
  • Rich-Media, VoIP, Video, Real-Time Text over IMS/SIP architectures
  • Wearable technology for supporting Emergency Services
  • Mobile applications and Social Media Exploitation for Emergency Services
  • User friendly, User disability aware Emergency Communication applications
  • Next Generation eCall, NG122, NG911
  • Emergency Communication and Management Simulators for Planning and Training
  • System Test-Beds and Demonstrators
  • Emerging Standards
Perspective authors are invited to submit using the EDAS system a full paper of not more than five (5) IEEE style pages including results, figures and references. Papers will be reviewed with the standard reviewing procedure (with at least 3 independent anonymous reviews). Accepted papers will be published on IEEExplore (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/).
The EDAS link for submission is here.
Hard deadline for submission is 12 March 2017.
Special Session Organizers

Dr Ilias Politis, Hellenic Open University (ilpolitis@eap.gr)
Dr Evangelos Markakis TEI of Crete, Greece (markakis@pasiphae.eu)
Dr. Yacine Rebahi Fraunhofer FOKUS, Germany (yacine.rebahi@fokus.fraunhofer.de)