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Testing E911: What you need to know now

Brock Butler and Susan Ahimovic, Spirent - April 20, 2012

North American operators are looking to enable E911 on their LTE networks within the next twelve
months. As a result, requirements for mobile devices are evolving to take advantage of new
positioning technologies and protocols, which in turn will lead to new test requirements.
Additionally, actions by the FCC are pushing improved accuracy and availability of E911 positioning,
making it likely that this next wave of LTE-enabled devices will deliver much-needed performance
improvements.

Today, more than 70% of 911 calls originate from mobile devices and more than 60% of 911 calls
originate indoors. Here’s a possible scenario:

Cell phone caller (small child): "My mommy is hurt, she is on the floor and can’t talk"
911 Operator: "Where are you?"
Cell phone caller: "Chicago"
911 Operator: "Where in Chicago?"
Cell phone caller: "In my house”
911 Operator: "Where is your house?"
Cell phone caller: "In Chicago”

In a good case, E911 from a mobile phone should locate an indoor user to within 50m, leaving
emergency responders with the option of about 27 houses to choose from in the situation illustrated
in Figure 1. However, the accuracy is often significantly worse. How to save this child’s mother?

Figure 1 Impact of Location Accuracy on E911 Call: A typical E911 call from a mobile
phone can pinpoint location within 50m, translating to about 27 houses in this type of
neighborhood.

In the event of an emergency, we have been trained since childhood in the US to dial 911 from the
closest available phone which, back when almost every household had plain old telephone service,
enabled the emergency operator to look up the exact physical location of the phone line used to
originate the call and coordinate a response. Today with the majority of 911 calls originate from
mobile devices, pinpointing the exact location of callers is not so simple.

Many technologies have been used to locate mobile phones, including assisted GPS (A-GPS), cell ID
(CID), enhanced cell ID (ECID), advanced forward link trilateration (AFLT), downlink observed time
difference of arrival (OTDOA), uplink time difference of arrival (UTDOA), and angle of arrival (AoA).
They may read like acronym soup, but their effectiveness is fundamental to the outcome of life-o-
-death emergency 911 calls that originate from mobile phones.

More than 10 years ago, the US Federal Communication Commission (FCC) phased in its E911
Phase II location requirements for US wireless network operators and mobile devices: caller location
must be provided to public-safety answering points (PSAPs) with 50 meter accuracy for 67 percent
of calls and 100 meter accuracy for 95 percent of calls. The original requirements included a
relaxed location accuracy requirement for network-based technologies, although this is scheduled to
be phased out by the end of 2018. The FCC is also investigating ways to further improve the
performance of locating 911 callers who use mobile devices. All of this is spurred by a basic
problem: despite all the technology, location accuracy is often just not good enough when calls are
placed from mobile phones; in some cases usable location information is impossible to obtain,
especially when calls are made indoors.

Industry bodies such as 3GPP and 3GPP2 have developed compliance standards for mobile device
performance to help ensure the FCC’s location accuracy requirements are achieved. These
standards are intended to ensure minimum location performance (accuracy and response time) and
protocol compliance for communicating location information (see Table 1 for a list of these
standards), and must be met by every GPS-enabled phone sold in the United States. Since these
standards are global, they are often a requirement in other markets as well. For 2G and 3G devices
that use CDMA, GSM or WCDMA technology, the requirements are well established. However, the
recent push to launch LTE (often referred to as “4G”) networks in the US and other countries is
shaking things up.

Table 1 - Industry Standards That Help Ensure FCC E911 Requirements Are Achieved
E911 and LTE
LTE is the next generation technology for wireless networks. While there may still be plenty of life
left in 3G UMTS and CDMA technologies, the rapid growth in the popularity of smartphones and
tablets, along with the data-hungry applications they support (mobile data traffic in the U.S.
increased by 172 percent in 2011, according to Cisco Systems), is pushing many operators into a
position where they have no choice but to deploy LTE.

With LTE migration well underway in North America, wireless service providers are focusing on a
comprehensive plan to upgrade the technologies that enable caller location identification in order to
deploy next-generation E911 solutions. This technology upgrade offers two major opportunities to
the industry.

First, supporting emergency services over LTE networks helps to free network operators to
reallocate valuable 2G and 3G spectrum to LTE (4G), enabling better network efficiency and data
capacity. As a result, in the next two or three years we are likely to see many areas of the US where
LTE is the only technology deployed by some wireless operators. Second, the new location
technologies and protocols being deployed as part of the move to LTE bring opportunities for
enhanced location performance, mainly through use of additional technologies such as Wi-Fi and
sensor-based positioning that perform better indoors (from where 60% of calls are placed).

Designers need to understand how the different positioning technologies (or combinations of
technologies) play into the requirement to support E911 on LTE networks in North America, and the
implications for testing the complex new positioning scenarios that can result. However, many of the
key points are also applicable to emergency services in other regions, which need to take similar
testing and deployment challenges into consideration as part of their migration to LTE.

What Does LTE mean for Wireless E911 services?


The transition to LTE means that operators have to aggressively support E911 location technology
on LTE networks. Traditionally, legacy networks are used for E911 while new technology is built out
to critical mass. This is the current transitional strategy for many operators in the US, but it will not
last for long: LTE-only E911 services will launch in 2013, if not sooner.

To understand the impact of this, we will review briefly the technology used for E911 positioning in
LTE networks.

LTE Positioning Technology


LTE positioning includes both handset-based and network-based techniques. No current positioning
technology is capable of providing the FCC’s required accuracy level by itself, so a combination of
multiple technologies will likely be needed [1]. Network-based technologies, including UTDOA and
AoA, rely on network measurements to locate mobile devices, whereas handset-based technologies
such as OTDOA, A-GNSS, and ECID rely on mobile devices’ measurements. Although network-based
technologies play an important role, the focus of this article is on handset-based technologies,
because of the test implications for the mobile devices that support them.

Current LTE standards, defined in 3GPP Release 9, support three handset-based positioning
technologies:
• ECID
• A-GNSS. Examples: GPS, GLONASS, Galileo
• Downlink OTDOA

Two relevant location protocols are also employed in LTE deployments:


• LTE Positioning Protocol (LPP)
• Secure User Plane Location Version 2.0 (SUPL 2.0)

These protocols are also able to support other technologies that can be used to improve location
performance but are not currently defined by any standard, such as Wi-Fi positioning and sensor-
based location (i.e. accelerometers, magnetometers, barometers). Location techniques that make
use of multiple technologies are often referred to as “hybrid” positioning.

ECID provides a quick, coarse position fix with accuracy of 50m to 500m and is not capable of
meeting E911 performance requirements by itself. However, it is used in conjunction with other
more accurate positioning technologies, or as a fallback method when other positioning technologies
are not available.

A-GNSS augments the device’s GNSS capability with assistance data supplied over the LTE
network, allowing the device to more quickly and easily acquire satellite signals. Although A-GNSS
is the technology of choice for positioning, providing accuracy within 5-20m, its performance is poor
indoors or in areas with high signal obscuration and multipath, such as city streets.

OTDOA is a handset-based technology that relies on measurement of the time difference of arrival
of special Positioning Reference Signals (PRS) from 2 or more neighboring LTE base stations. This
technology is most useful when GNSS is not available because it can provide reasonably accurate
positioning (about 25-200m) indoors or in environments with limited visibility of the sky.

A-GNSS and OTDOA can be used together in LTE networks to enable significantly more accurate
positioning in challenging environments.

The ultimate combination, which is not currently supported for E911 (although this may eventually
change due to pressure from FCC to improve performance), is the fusion of LTE Network, GNSS, Wi-
Fi, and Sensor technologies—or simply, hybrid positioning.
Location Protocols
With the arrival of LTE comes a new protocol, LPP, which supports positioning technologies by
enabling the exchange of positioning and assistance data between the handset and the network.
LPP is intended for use over both the control plane and the user plane and is a critical element in
enabling E911 and Location Based Services (LBS) on LTE networks. Control plane positioning is
primarily used for emergency services. In these situations, the network instructs the UE to provide
a position and may send unsolicited assistance data to the UE over the signaling connection.
Control plane positioning offers a quick, reliable and secure method for support of emergency
services.

LPP also serves as the primary positioning enabler over the user plane, in conjunction with SUPL
2.0. The latter provides a common user plane protocol with a rich feature set which is critical to
enabling LBS on LTE (as well as 2G and 3G) networks. SUPL 2.0 provides an option for handling
emergency calls over the user plane, which was not available in previous 2G and 3G deployments.
In emergency scenarios, the positioning requests will override user notification and privacy settings
and receive priority over all non-emergency SUPL sessions.

For initial deployments of LTE, some operators are choosing to implement LPP over the control
plane, while others are choosing the user plane. These implementation differences will require LTE
mobile devices to support both methods.

Testing E911 in LTE networks


As shown in Table 1, new test specifications from 3GPP detail minimum performance and protocol
conformance testing for A-GNSS, OTDOA, and ECID using an LTE air interface (3GPP TS 37.571).
These test specifications will ultimately become the conformance standard used to certify devices in
the United States. However, many other types of tests will ultimately be used to ensure that E911
works well on LTE Networks [2].

3GPP TS 37.571 Using SUPL 2.0 User Plane


While some operators deploy E911 using LPP control plane, others will use SUPL 2.0 user plane with
an LPP payload. Since the 3GPP TS 37.571 tests all use LPP Control Plane signaling, a modified
version of these tests will be needed to test SUPL 2.0 emergency call performance. Although it is
currently unclear whether this will become an official certification requirement, the operators that
plan to deploy E911 over SUPL 2.0 user plane will certainly require devices to pass the modified
version of these conformance tests.

Specialized Network Operator Acceptance Tests


In 2G and 3G network deployments, specialized E911 tests were developed by individual network
operators to test performance requirements not covered by the standards-based conformance
testing, and these operator-specific acceptance tests will extend to LTE devices. Examples include
performance in specific simulated outdoor and indoor environments, exercising of special protocol
sequences, combined A-GNSS/OTDOA testing, and assessing the reliability of continuous E911
position fixes.

A-GPS Antenna Performance (Over-The-Air)


Where GPS technology is used, the GPS antenna implementation plays a big role in E911
performance. If antenna performance is poor, the ability to acquire satellites is diminished and
location performance is degraded in areas where the sky is partially obstructed. To help ensure an
adequate level of antenna performance, CTIA-The Wireless Association® added GPS testing to its
Test Plan for Mobile Station Over the Air Performance. Although the current 3.1 version of this test
plan specifies a procedure only for testing A-GPS in GSM, WCDMA, and CDMA devices, an upcoming
version will extend this to LTE.

R&D Testing
As if all the “compliance” tests set up by 3GPP, CTIA, OMA, and the individual network operators
wasn’t enough, the majority of LTE Location testing falls into the generic category of “R&D” testing.
This is the testing done to improve and accelerate the development of the underlying location
technologies used for E911. As shown in Figure 2, R&D testing can fit into several different
categories, which apply to all location technologies, especially A-GNSS and OTDOA.

Figure 2 Many layers of R&D testing are required to ensure E911 performance

Test Solutions
Not surprisingly, it takes a highly-specialized test solution to perform all of this testing for E911 on
LTE networks. A solution of this type can be expected to need the following key capabilities:

• LTE Network Emulator – Must be capable of simulating at least three LTE cells, with each cell
MIMO-enabled and capable of supporting OTDOA (PRS Physical Channel). Even more LTE cells may
be needed in R&D test scenarios.
• GNSS Satellite Simulator – Must be capable of simulating GPS and GLONASS satellites, and be
able to support standardized satellite scenarios for conformance testing. Much more advanced
simulation capabilities are likely to be required for operator and R&D testing.
• eSMLC Emulation – Simulation of a key network entity called an eSMLC (enhanced Serving
Mobile Location Center) is required. This entity is used to deliver assistance data to devices for A-
GNSS and OTDOA and (in some cases) to also perform location calculations. The delivery of
assistance data must be very accurately synchronized with the LTE and GNSS signal simulation.
• Automated Test Executive – With the exception of very early R&D, almost all testing is performed
through automated test software that allows multiple tests to be run in series while results are
collected and reported. Best-in-class test executives provide detailed results and analysis to
facilitate debugging of issues after tests have been performed, and are robust enough to run test
campaigns over weekends that reliably produce trustworthy results.

Designers need to use a highly-specialized test solution to perform E911 testing on LTE
networks.

In conclusion, multiple trends are currently combining to drive a major change in mobile device
location performance and the associated testing:
(1) Location identification performance for E911 calls originating from mobile phone needs to
improve
(2) Network operators, particularly in the US, are looking to re-allocate 2G and 3G spectrum to
LTE as quickly as possible, requiring E911 to work on LTE networks.
(3) New technologies and protocols for LTE positioning offer an opportunity to improve E911
performance

One result of all this is a new set of requirements for industry conformance, operator acceptance,
and R&D testing that will eventually help E911 and other emergency services around the world to
work better.
References:
[1] More detailed information can be found in the Spirent White Paper “An Overview of LTE
Positioning”
[2] More detailed information can be found in the Spirent White Paper “LTE Positioning
Technology For Mobile Devices: Test Challenges and Solutions”

About the Authors


Brock Butler is the director for Wireless Location Technology at Spirent and has spent over 12 years
creating test and measurement solutions for the wireless industry. Brock is part of a team that has
made major contributions to development of the LBS standards in the 3GPP: Spirent filled the editor
and rapporteur roles for the TS 51.010 and TS 34.171 A-GPS Terminal Conformance Specifications,
as well as the editor role for the Enabler Test Specification for SUPL in the OMA. Brock holds a BSc
in electrical engineering from Villanova University.

Susan Ahimovic is the product marketing manager for Spirent’s wireless line of business. Susan has
spent 14 year working in the telecommunication sector, including Bellcore and Lucent Technologies.
Susan holds an MSc in computer science from Stevens Institute of Technology and a BSc in music
and computer engineering from the University of Michigan.

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