# Communication Technologies in Emergency Situations
## 3 Desk Research
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline \hline
**ECS Requirement** & **Description** \\ \hline Voice and data are the traditional two main service categories required for public safety communications. Even though we could consider voice just another data service, it has to be treated as a separate category due to its primary role in first-responded communications. In addition, interactive data services should be supported, including instant messaging and video conferencing. Further requirements are internet connectivity and support for web-based services. The system should also be able to support real-time transmission of vital statistics of objects or persons and non-interactive data services including email and file transfer. Quality of Service (QoS) support is especially important in the system. It should be able to differentiate between traffic of different priority levels because high-priority traffic should receive precedence to guarantee delivery of urgent messages in case of network congestion. Finally, with the evolution of communication technologies, multimedia services are becoming more and more important in ECS. Indeed, the updates from an incident site in the form of still photographs and good quality videos keep the coordinators updated on the FRs’ activities and play a crucial role in efficient decision making, and even videoconference services are being successfully used for virtual medical assistance in certain emergency scenarios. \\ \hline Security & Large scale disasters require responses from multiple federal, state, and local agencies with different charters and also from military forces. A tremendous amount of sensitive data in the network could be exposed to the transmission media and should be appropriately protected. \\ \hline Cost & The network should incur reasonable cost for deployment and maintenance, and off-the-shelf technologies should be adopted to the maximum extent possible. \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Cont. is confirmed as one of the most active fields of research in the domain of ECS nowadays, and many of the most relevant works are described in Sections 3 and 4. Finally, this paper is also aligned with [12], in confirming that ECS is an important topic all over the world, being first China, second US, third Germany, fourth UK, and fifth India, among the top listed contributing countries. Nevertheless, compared to the previous review [12], the present work is not a bibliometric survey, and neither does it focus on all the ICT-based works, but instead focuses on the communications technologies in emergencies and includes the analysis and open issues of each of these technologies, with an important novel focus on their integration. More like the review of this paper, ref. [16] presents a complete survey in Wireless Technologies for Emergency Response. Indeed, modern wireless technologies are the most suitable in disaster situations because, first, they are not infrastructure-dependent, second, may allow the transmission of high-resolution data (videos, maps, etc.) through multipath and collaborative communications, and finally, may contribute to the end-to-end tracking and health monitoring of victims for an efficient emergency management. As it has been done in this paper, ref. [16] identifies the most relevant surveys in the topic prior to its publication (from 2009 to 2017), highlighting the fact that, in most of them, only few technologies are addressed, but it still lacks a brief description of each of the surveys. In contrast, the present review includes a more accurate description of all the identified surveys. Finally, ref. [16] concludes the paper with some guidelines to help public safety organizations in choosing the right technology and system according to the scenario requirement but does not address their integration, which is an important drawback. Finally, the conclusions presented in Section 5 are also different from [16]. While both works describe the advantages and disadvantages of each technology for different application scenarios, ref.