Commercial Mobile Alert Service (CMAS) Scenarios

This report supports the Department of Homeland Security Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation program in its collaboration with the Federal Communications Commission on the Commercial Mobile Alert Service CMAS. CMAS plays a critical role in providing targeted alerts to a geographic area. As a system-of-systems implementation, CMAS crosses many organizations to accomplish its mission. Identifying the steps taken to respond to an incident across various system and organizational boundaries can help expose potential barriers and challenges to CMAS integration. This report organizes these steps into three types of scenarios. Operational mission threads illustrate the security and organizational aspects of the integration strategy, development mission threads illustrate technical and acquisition aspects of the integration strategy, and quality attribute scenarios illustrate nonfunctional aspects of the system such as latency, resilience, or scalability. The analysis of these scenarios will help CMAS stakeholders determine how to handle the challenges that they experience as part of this large-scale integration.