Systems and Methods for Identifying a Geographical Area in a Commercial Mobile Alert Service Message

• US 20110081884A1
• Filed: 10/01/2009
• Published: 04/07/2011
• Est. Priority Date: 10/01/2009
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: AT&T Mobility II LLC (AT&T, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: AT&T Mobility II LLC (AT&T, Inc.)
• Inventors: Daly, Brian K., Sennett, Dewayne
• Granted Patent: US 8,224,285 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 455/404.2
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 4/02 Services making use of location information
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 4/021 Services related to particular areas, e.g. point of interest [POI] services, venue services or geofences
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 4/90 Services for handling of emergency or hazardous situations, e.g. earthquake and tsunami warning systems [ETWS]
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 76/50 for emergency connections

Abstract

Geographical locations can be encoded in alert messages and the encoded geographical locations can be processed are disclosed. Emergency alerts can be received from an emergency provider or governmental agency comprising a geographical code. The code can be evaluated to determine a geographical location by determining a primary location, such as a state or region, and a secondary location such as a county. This information can be used to determine the devices within a wireless network that should receive the alert message.

Claims

1. A system for identifying a geographical area from a code in an emergency alert, the system comprising:

a receiver configured to receive the emergency alert;

a processor configured to determine a geographical code from the emergency alert; and

the processor further configured to determine the geographical area from the geographical code by;

determining a first geographical region from a first subset of the geographical code, and

determining a second geographical region from a second subset of the geographical code, wherein the second geographical region is within the first geographical region.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the first subset of the geographical code is a representation of two characters, and wherein the second subset of the geographical code is a representation of three characters.

3. The system of claim 1, wherein the emergency alert is a Commercial Mobile Alert Message (CMAM).

4. The system of claim 1, further comprising determining contents of the emergency alert and generating a broadcast message comprising at least a portion of the contents of the emergency alert.

5. The system of claim 4, further comprising transmitting the broadcast message to at least one wireless device within the geographical area.

6. The system of claim 1, further comprising determining at least one base transceiver station within the geographical area.

7. The system of claim 1, further comprising determining at least one base station controller within the geographical area.

8. The system of claim 1, further comprising determining at least one UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN) within the geographical area.

9. The system of claim 1, wherein the processor is configured on a Commercial Mobile Service Provider (CMSP) gateway.

10. The system of claim 1, wherein the processor is configured on a cell broadcast center.

11. The system of claim 1, wherein the processor is configured on a base station controller.

12. A method of encoding a geographical area in an emergency alert, the method comprising:

receiving a first geographical region on a computing device;

receiving a second geographical region on the computing device;

receiving alert contents on the computing device;

generating, on the computing device, a first subset of a geographical code representing the first geographical region comprising two characters;

generating, on the computing device, a second subset of the geographical code representing the second geographical region comprising three characters;

generating, on the computing device, the emergency alert comprising the first subset, the second subset, and the alert contents; and

transmitting the emergency alert to a Commercial Mobile Service Provider (CMSP).

13. The method of claim 12, wherein generating the first subset of the geographical code comprises selecting two characters from Federal Information Processing Standard state numeric codes based on the received first geographical region.

14. The method of claim 12, wherein generating the second subset of the geographical code comprises selecting three characters from Federal Information Processing Standard county numeric codes based on the received second geographical region.

15. The method of claim 12, wherein the first geographical region comprises the United States, and wherein generating the first subset of the geographical code comprises generating the characters “

US”

based on the first geographical region.

16. The method of claim 15, wherein the second geographical region comprises a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) region, and wherein generating the second subset of the geographical code comprises selecting three characters representing the FEMA region.

17. The method of claim 15, wherein the second geographical region comprises a National Weather Service (NWS) region, and wherein generating the second subset of the geographical code comprises selecting three characters representing the NWS region.