Uncovering Problematic Designs Hindering Ubiquitous Cellular Emergency Services Access
Year: 2024
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Cellular networks provide the most accessible emergency services with ubiquitous coverage, yet their emergency-specific designs remain largely unexplored. To systematically explore potential design defects that lead to failures or delays in emergency services, we introduce M911-Verifier, an emergency-specific model checking tool. It reveals many counterintuitive findings regarding the ubiquitous access support for cellular emergency services. Our study shows that, despite sufficient wireless signal coverage, users may still experience prolonged emergency call setup times, call initiation failures, or call drops due to flaws in the design of cellular emergency services. These design defects arise from three major causes: problematic network selection for initiating emergency calls, emergency-unaware call operation, and network escalation forbidden during emergency calls. The impacts of these defects have been experimentally validated across three U.S. carriers and two Taiwan carriers using commodity smartphones. Finally, we propose solutions and evaluate their effectiveness.
Language: English
Subfield: Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funder: National Science Foundation
Awards: EAGER: Systems of Holographic Optical Tags for Scalable and Collaborative Mobile Infrastructures, NeTS: Small: Exploring the Non-Standardized Polices, Operations, and Requirements for 5G Cellular Networks and Beyond: Advancing the Modeling, Tools, and Evaluation, Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Safeguarding Next-Generation Emergency Services (NG-9-1-1) over Cellular Networks: From Design to Practice, Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Safeguarding Next-Generation Emergency Services (NG-9-1-1) over Cellular Networks: From Design to Practice
OpenAlex ID: W4405014945