The safety of vessels’ waterborne operations, which is closely related to lives and property, has become the most important element in navigation. However, the land-based monitor system faces great challenges since China is a country with large maritime territory and accidents in the sea are usually unpredictable. For these reasons, the monitor system should not only provide full-time and all-weather communication channels to receive signals sent by vessels in distress, but also process the message as soon as possible. Therefore, it is necessary to build a distress and rescue information system and specify rules of message transmission to ensure the success of communication between ships and rescue center. This paper introduces the background of Distress and Rescue Information System and reviews the current status of system in distress and rescue field which can deliver distress messages to the command center accurately in less delay, it has raised the level of automation in message transmission. System can also improve the security level of message transmission process and identify responsibilities in the distress rescue task.