TIA TSB-4973.000

Description / Abstract: Introduction

This document provides an overview of the structure of the TIA standards describing protocols for interoperable communications over wireless broadband systems.

In 2011 the Emergency Response Interoperability Center identified a set of "Applications Important to Public Safety" for the 700 MHz National Public Safety Broadband Network (Ref. (1)). Specifically¹:

• Emergency Function

• Global Positioning Information

• CMAS-Public Warning

• Incident Management Tools

• Welcome Page

• Internet Access

• Virtual Private Networking

• Text Messaging

• Video

• File Transfer

• Telemetry

• Push-to-Talk Voice

The standards described herein provide standardized protocols for a subset of the recommended applications listed above. Often, the TIA documents provide specific operating profiles for existing protocols codified by TIA or other standards development organizations (SDOs) in order to leverage existing standards to the greatest possible degree consistent with satisfying the needs of the public safety community and other users of wireless broadband systems.

The TIA standards do not define applications, but rather define protocols that can be used by applications to meet the needs of public safety and others. Generally, these standards specify the upper layers (5-7 of the OSI model) and identify the transport layer (layer 4) to be used for the protocol.

To facilitate development of a diverse set of applications by a multiplicity of vendors that are nevertheless interoperable, this suite of TIA standards defines protocols for the various required services. Furthermore, because the fusion of information from various content services will be an important part of public safety applications, TIA will standardize an underlying grammar and semantics for commonly used information elements. Application protocols that share such information elements, will greatly simplify the development of sophisticated applications that span multiple services. Figure 1 illustrates this concept. Here a public safety user accesses a variety of content services (i.e. application protocols) that all share data representations for the "context" of the service. This "metadata" can include location information (e.g. where a particular video was shot), security data (e.g. a series of digital signatures to prove chain of custody), incident tags, and a variety of other common data.

This document is organized as follows:

Section 2 contains a list of abbreviations used in this document.

Section 3 contains a list of references.

Section 4 describes an architectural model for the standards, and

Section 5 summarizes the structure and nomenclature of the series of standards documents.

¹ Ref. (1 pp. 6-10)