TEZE: A System to Enhance Safety in Highway Tunnels as a New Smartphone-Based Emergency Call Paradigm

In the European Union, the eCall system has been mandatory since 31 March 2018. The system enabled a significant increase in safety on roads and highways, making help faster in the event of an accident. However, based on circuit-switched 2G/3G communications and an onboard device called IVS, it is generally unavailable on legacy vehicles. Some of its limitations tend to be remedied by the future NG eCall based on 4G/5G packet-switched communications. This paper discusses why the IVS may be an Achilles’ heel of any future IVS-based eCall and analyzes the advantages of a smartphone-based system. The TEZE system, starting to be implemented and installed in Italian highway tunnels, is one first general-purpose safety system, allowing highly reliable smartphone-based emergency calls. It is based on a dedicated low-cost ground infrastructure that allows monitoring of the availability of emergency call service through the mobile radio networks of the operators present inside a tunnel. The system complies with the ISO/IEC 30141:2018 reference standard. Identifying functional/non-functional requirements and their verification criteria provides an overall validation of the analyzed system. The TEZE system has been implemented and tested on the field. We report and comment on some experimental results. The paper also examines some key functionalities for vehicular services that can be implemented in an integrated system based on smartphones and heterogeneous networks.