Towards a full-duplex emergency alert system based on IPTV platform

Recently, IPTV has become a convergent infrastructure for entertainment and communications services in our daily life. An IPTV set-top-box is now an important device in the Internet-of-things of each home. It is expected that this infrastructure would be suitable for emergency alert systems (EAS), especially in disaster and health-care scenarios. In this paper, we first review the recent developments to support emergency scenarios, including related IPTV standards and research in smart home. Then we propose an architecture for full-duplex emergency alert services based on IPTV platform. In order to maintain a very high availability of service, the key features of the architecture include the redundancy of devices and network connections and the scalability of data.