This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will extend the successful findings of Phase I of the project to investigate the technical feasibility of an innovative emergency notification system that delivers emergency alerts to people over the web. The proposed activity involves advancing technical knowledge in the areas of network edge applications and HTTP traffic processing. With the web having a large audience and increasingly becoming a source of multimedia infotainment, its appeal as an emergency notification channel, in the same vein as TV and radio, has grown, especially given its potential for delivering detailed and customized information. The objective of the proposed research is to complete a network edge application that introduces web alerts to web-users, without requiring any special client-side software installation or web-user registration. The effort will extend the work performed in Phase I to technically mature two key system components: 1) a network appliance component hosting a network edge application that applies innovative HTTP processing algorithms to web traffic to introduce the alert in a controlled fashion and without unnecessarily disrupting the web-user?s browsing; and 2) a centralized control component.
The product from the proposed effort will have the potential of enhancing the emergency notification capability and effectiveness at campuses, which in turn bolsters emergency preparedness and response efforts, potentially saving lives during life-threatening emergencies. The long-term plan is to extend the deployment of the product to the general public, thus extending the emergency-related societal benefit to the general public.
Public emergency notification plays a critical role in the nation’s overall emergency preparedness and management. It is important that next-generation alert technologies include technologies for Broadband emergency notification, because the public is increasingly migrating to Broadband for infotainment (away from TV & Radio). This trend is decreasing the effectiveness and reach of the existing TV and Radio Emergency Alert System (EAS), with no analogous EAS technology for Broadband to counter it. The project’s research and development efforts focused on a system for Broadband emergency alerts, and in particular on innovative technologies for web-browser alerts and online video alerts. If someone is browsing the web, the system would cut in over it and displays a webpage containing the emergency alert; or if someone is viewing an online video, such as on YouTube or on ESPN3, it would cut in over that and show instead a video alert. A key feature in the innovative technologies is that they would not require the end-user to install special software or register for the service. Also one advantage is that once the alert is web-based, it inherits the advantages of the web, including richness of information, customizing the alert to the language and location of the recipient, and linkability to social networking platforms such as Google+, Facebook and Twitter. This system will have the immediate societal benefit of enhancing the nation’s emergency notification capability and effectiveness, which in turn bolsters emergency preparedness and response efforts, potentially saving lives during life-threatening emergencies. The project entailed advancing technical knowledge in the areas of network edge applications, HTTP traffic processing, deep packet inspection and modification, and processing application-layer network streaming protocols. The effort extended previous work performed in Phase I of the project to technically mature two key system components: 1) a network appliance component hosting a network edge application that applies innovative processing algorithms to Broadband traffic to introduce Broadband alerts in a controlled fashion and without unnecessarily disrupting the end-user’s browsing/viewing; and 2) a centralized control component for activating and managing the alerts, securely and efficiently. At the end of the project, the system’s technology readiness level is at the level of a beta prototype. The goal is to pilot the prototype on a college campus, and to leverage lessons learned from the pilot to advance its technology readiness level to that of a deployment-ready product. At first, the product will be deployed on college campuses, but eventually it will be extended to the general public. The general-public extension involves using premises of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), who will receive premises-use fees. These fees will generate new revenue streams for ISPs, which will potentially help improve ISP economics. There has been a growing concern among Internet experts about the current economic structure of the Internet which favors web content/application providers over ISPs, and has led to continual erosion in ISP margins. It is feared that this will result in two undesirable consequences: 1) ISPs significantly reducing capital investment in their infrastructure (including deploying the socially beneficial Broadband in rural and low-income urban areas), and 2) ISPs resorting to a walled-garden approach with exclusive content-provider partners. The general-public deployment of the emergency notification product can help offset some the erosion in access prices from new premises-use revenues.
