Abstract
The spread of the Internet has made it important as a potential means of lifeline communication. The Internet can fulfill a role in the everyday life of citizens by offering lifeline communication services such as the police, ambulance, gas, electricity, water service when an emergency occurs. In these lifeline communications, a caller needs to be able to communicate with the nearby lifeline service agency the same as on PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Networks) without being consciously aware of the path the caller?s message is taking. Moreover, the lifeline service agency must be able to acquire the caller?s location and identity. However, it is very difficult to transfer these essential functions from the PSTN to the Internet without making significant changes because of the large differences between the PSTN and the Internet. In this paper, we discuss how to obtain these functions for lifeline communications in the Internet. We further propose a model and implement a lifeline communication system on the Internet.