GPS World, April 2015

EXPERT ADVICE Taking Up Positions Galileo and E112 Andy Proctor S essions on indoor navigation and a keynote from Google at Februarys International Navigation Conference INC15 organised by the Royal Institute of Navigation addressed the revised E911 positioning requirements in the United States and flowed over into speculation about E112 emergency calling parameters in Europes near future Europe is looking at the imposition of Galileo as part of an A GNSS technology push for E112 emergency calling applications E112 processes currently do not specify performance criteria for the position location accuracy According to the 2014 U S Federal Communications Commission report 75 percent of 911 calls now come from mobile phones more than half of those originate indoors and around 1 percent of emergency calls contain no location information from the caller due to distress confusion language issues illness and so on The report estimates 10000 deaths per year in the United States might have been avoided if a landline had been used instead since location information for landlines can be provided confidently Discussion in the breaks of INC highlighted a misunderstanding amongst some parties that E911 mandates the use of GPS for position location determination In fact E911 does not mandate any specific technology it specifies performance criteria in terms of accuracy that must be met The recently revised performance criteria include indoor performance and some of the technology discussed at the INC is able to meet these requirements without using GNSS at all This could be troublesome for Europe which is looking at the imposition of Galileo as part of an A GNSS technology push for the E112 application The real problems discussed during INC and in European consultation processes with safety of life services such as E112 are the accuracy of the position derived by the device and or network and the timeliness of the delivery of that position to the Public Service Answering Point PSAP The E911 directives address these points directly and the infrastructure in the cellular networks is in place Does simply implementing a Galileo capability into a European mobile device solve these problems In many outdoor cases implementing Galileo can bring benefits including signal diversity And of course the E112 proposal is greater than just adding Galileo It does address the second problem of timeliness of delivery and data transfer but there are significant infrastructure upgrades required across Europe for the provision of this location data to the PSAPs What the E112 processes do not currently do is specify performance criteria for the position location accuracy This means that the position estimate provided under E112 is likely to be a cell ID fix with an accuracy ranging from hundreds of meters to dozens of kilometers Galileo on Mobiles Further discussion during the conference delved into the realms of the specifics of implementing A GNSS including Galileo onto a mobile device Conversations centered around if any future E911 or E112 positioning capability would be aligned around a single chip solution as generally currently deployed on a device or if some of the functions will be moved up the stack into the operating system OS of the device into software Most opinions were against this latter concept and a panel at the ION GNSS last year in Florida concluded the same thing However questions were asked about some ideas relating to identifying the emergency number at the time of dialing and then starting the position location determination functions in readiness for the need to provide the device location This addresses the first bullet point earlier the accuracy of the position derived by the device and or network If this is carried out in the OS or software layers vulnerability of the system will be increased overall as the OS of a mobile device is a target for the cyber criminal community A robust software based solution is however being rolled out in the United Kingdom in the form of eSMS GPS World April 2015 www gpsworld com 28