Common Alerting Protocol Compliant Emergency Warning And Alert System for Legacy Broadcasting Networks

Abstract

In case of a natural or human intervened disaster and other similar emergency situations, damage to life and property can be minimized if there is a system or mechanism for proper dissemination of information and alerts so that mitigation and preventive measures can be taken well in time by population. Unfortunately existence of such emergency warning alert systems is rare and if they do exist their effectiveness raises concerns. This outreach of emergency messages to the masses can be made more effective if national broadcasting agencies are involved. All India Radio (AIR) is India's national broadcaster. When it comes to reaching out to masses via radio network, All India Radio has the largest outreach in the world. As All India Radio has a broad coverage of population, a Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) compliant system incorporated with broadcasting organization has a greater impact on population. This feature can be implemented with digital radios but changing the complete infrastructure posses huge cost investment. This paper proposes a low cost CAP compliant system for All India Radio with no or minimal impact on AIR legacy infrastructure. The system being proposed possesses compliance with Common Alerting Protocol which is an Extensible Markup Language (XML) based data format for exchanging public warning and emergency messages between alerting technologies. The proposed system extracts information embedded in a CAP message and makes it available to the AIR broadcasting system which is then disseminated using its transmitters. The system is also designed to display the message on public display screens. E-mails are also sent to concerned authorities. The proposed system follows a multichannel approach for information dissemination.