WEA - Integration Strategy

The Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) service, formerly known as the Commercial Mobile Alert Service (CMAS), is a collaborative partnership that includes the cellular industry, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate. This report, Study of Integration Strategy Considerations for Wireless Emergency Alerts, supports the WEA Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation (RDT&E) program by identifying and analyzing key WEA adoption issues. Because each organization’s situation is different, emergency management agencies (EMAs) should adapt the information in this report to build their own WEA integration strategies to enable the successful deployment, operation, and sustainment of the WEA capability.

This report presents the results of a study performed in partnership with the EMA community. The results are generalized from interactions with a wide array of WEA stakeholders that included small EMAs, university emergency managers, city and county EMAs, state-level EMAs, territories, national alerting organizations, vendors of systems for issuing WEA messages, Common Alerting Protocol standard experts, and people building open-source alerting systems. The goal of the study was to capture key challenges for WEA message originators and make recommendations to help the community avoid common pitfalls as it plans and implements the adoption and integration of WEA services with existing mobile alert and warning systems and tools.