Can Skype communicate with NG 112 systems?

The EMYNOS project produced a platform for enabling European citizens to make IP based emergency calls (to police, ambulance and fire brigade). Indeed, the output of EMYNOS was a Next Generation emergency call full chain, starting from the caller, going through the network (in particular, the ESInet), and ending at the emergency call taker client. Various functionalities such as emergency calls identification, caller/device location configuration, routing to the appropriate emergency call center, location information visualization, sensor data transmission, and protection against false calls were addressed. In addition to full NG112 emergency services, EMYNOS also developed gateways enabling the current Austrian Red Cross and the Romanian emergency systems to receive NG112 calls.

The question that may arise in practice is whether a proprietary system like Skype can communicate with NG112 call takers clients. In the following demo, we are going to describe a very basic scenario where a text conversation “session” is created between a Skype client and a NG112 client, and enabling the person that needs help to communicate with the emergency call taker. The figure below depicts the different components needed for the interaction:

EMYNOS Skype Interaction
| @Fraunhofer FOKUS

Here, Microsoft Azure is used. The latter is a Microsoft cloud computing service enabling development, testing, and deployment of services on Microsoft-managed data centers.

The Bot Framework provided by Microsoft Azure enabled us to develop a Web App Bot using Node.js, that interacts on the one hand with a Skype client and on the other hand with a middleware implementing our extended Liblinphone library. The middleware establishes first a SIP session with the Linphone Call Taker over the EMYNOS ESInet, then text starts flowing between the Skype Client and the Linphone Call Taker. A video showing this interaction can be found here.