European NG112 Crossroads: Toward a New Emergency Communications Framework

Abstract

Nowadays, citizens are getting used to new ways of agile communications supporting media-enriched and context-aware information. However, the adoption of these evolved technologies in emergency communications between citizens and public authorities faces a series of barriers, including the lack of harmonized and interoperable solutions. Different initiatives worldwide are addressing the need for specifying a stable IP-based next generation emergency communications framework. This article provides a general overview of the different international approaches with special focus on the European perspective, where the NG112 architecture has been specified, and it has now entered the testing and evaluation phase.