SkyView WARN Act Software Functional Description
The WARN (Warning, Alert, Response Network) Act establishes a process for wireless carriers, CMSPs (Commercial Mobile Service Providers) to voluntarily elect to transmit emergency alerts.
- The Commercial Mobile Service Alert Advisory Group (CMSAAC) has documented initial Commercial Mobile Alert Service (CMAS) architecture and initial requirements in October 2007.
- Federal, state, local, and tribal agencies would forward alert information to a federal government entity.
- This federal entity would then authenticate, aggregate, and forward the Commercial Mobile Alerts (CMAs) to the appropriate CMSPs.
- CMSP that agree to participate will receive the CMAs and broadcast to the appropriate portions of their networks.
- The Geo-targeting of CMAS alerts is critical
- Initial implementations would provide alerts at the county level.
- Most CMSP network elements (sites, sectors, transmitters) are significantly smaller than a county.
- The broadcast alert based upon the CMSP network elements would approximate a CMA polygon much more closely than the county level alerts.
4G Unwired & SkyView Software Development are currently developing the solution for the Geo-targeting portion of the CMAS. Our extensive experience in the wireless industry with many technologies and CMSPs gives us a unique insight in solving this problem. Experience with multiple commercial RF Propagation Modeling tools allows 4G to the flexibility to interface with many different vendors
Basic Functionality of the Software
The Geo-targeting computations identify the sector IDs of the sector/transmitters that provide coverage within the polygon.
Additional statistics can also be calculated
- Amount of area covered by each sector/transmitter.
- Percentage of CMAS polygon covered by each sector/transmitter.
- Percentage of sector/transmitter falling within the CMAS polygon.
- Sector/transmitters with extremely low overlap areas or coverage percentages can be filtered from the processed CMAS Alert list.
- The software will generate a list of network entities with sufficient overlap of the polygon (sectors identified by the sector ID that the base station controllers recognize) and pass that list along to the CMSP gateway to be broadcast along with the alert message
- This process is completely hands-off for network operations personnel
The software can then take input from the gateway and display the network coverage with the sites/sectors that broadcast the message clearly identified along with the polygon and the most recent alert message status
- The results of the geo-targeting can also be clearly depicted in SkyView WARN Act .
- The Polygon provided in the CMAS alert and the network elements selected in the geo-targeting can be updated in real time so the CMAS Messages are always current.
Basic Geo-Targeting Program Flowchart
