Terms of Reference (ToR) for ETSI (TC) Emergency Communications, EMTEL

Approved at Board#132 (April 2021)

Scope

The main objectives of TC EMTEL are:

• to capture and consolidate the requirements from the relevant stakeholders;

• to consider the appropriate scenarios including emergency communications: 
  • of individuals with authorities/organisations,
  • between authorities/organisations,
  • from authorities/organisations to the individuals,
  • amongst individuals,

• to identify gaps where existing standards do not fulfil the requirements and provide specifications and standards to fill these gaps, without duplication of work in other ETSI committees and partnership projects, or request other ETSI TBs to provide specifications to fill these gaps;
  
• to develop and maintain the Standards and other deliverables to support the development and implementation of emergency communications standardization within ETSI;

• to provide requirements on issues of network security, network integrity, network behaviour in emergency situations, and emergency telecommunications needs in networks;

• to coordinate work on emergency communications in ETSI with relevant external groups.

Areas of activity

The activities of TC EMTEL include the following broad areas:

• preparation and maintenance of ETSI deliverables used to describe requirements for Users, Network Architectures, Network Resilience, Contingency planning, Priority Communications, Priority Access Technologies and Network management;

• studies of the issues related to National Security and Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR);

• identification of relevant work outside ETSI on emergency communications that can be of interest for ETSI, e.g. EU projects.

TC EMTEL provides ETSI with a centre of expertise in the area of requirements for emergency communications and offers advice to ETSI Technical Bodies, the ETSI Board and the General Assembly.

Annex (informative): collaboration with other bodies

TC EMTEL will set-up the appropriate communication channels to the following groups both within and outside of ETSI.

ETSI groups
ETSI TCs that have a requirement for emergency communications in their work.
Examples are, and not limited to

• TC MSG
• EP eHealth
• TC HF

External groups
Coordination with European, National and International standards organisations,
as well as other bodies such as 

• 3GPP
• oneM2M
• Relevant associations or organisations etc