112 eCall – Lessons Learnt and Next Steps

Inhalt:
The 3GPP/CEN standard for pan-European in-vehicle emergency call service (eCall) [1-7] is mandated to be used over automatic mobile 112 calls in radio networks across Europe [19, 20]. Beginning of this year, the 3rd project phase of the Harmonized eCall European Pilots (named IHeERO) started with the focus on supporting the infrastructure deployment and providing guidelines for compliance assessment as well as recommendations for next generation eCall [8]. Over the last years, Qualcomm was quite involved in many eCall aspects, ranging from technology development for the now standardized in-band modem, field testing and providing technical input to different stakeholders and regulatory bodies worldwide [10-14]. In this paper, we like to provide the lessons learnt from our past activities. Herewith, best practices as well as recent field validation results with wideband adaptive multi rate (AMR-WB) speech codec will be demonstrated. Furthermore, a certification framework approach for current the eCall technology as well as a migration path to next generation (NG) mobile networks employing all-IP connectivity currently discussed in different stakeholder fora are outlined.