Location Aware Mobile Application Services
The market’s focus will move from network services to production and packaging of value added services. This will force many dedicated service providers to broaden their service portfolio to protect their customer base. The players who succeed in broadening their service offering will become Enhanced Service Providers. They will bundle a broad range of communications and multimedia services to target different vertical market segments. Many telecom operators can be expected to establish new businesses as Enhanced Service Providers.
The convergence of IT and mobile telecommunications is the driving force making this class of service possible
Positioning Technologies: Radio Network and Enhanced GPS
Several technologies have been advanced for locating cell phones, wirelesss PDAs and mobile devices. These can be broadly classed into two categories: base station triangulation methods and GPS-based methods. Triangulation methods use information about the location of the base station radios to triangulate on a mobile device, either with received radio signals or transmitted synchronization pulses. These type of infrastructure is being widely tested for deployment to satisfy FCC requirements.
In all triangulation methods, the a minimum of three base stations—or three base stations are required to to obtain a position fix on the mobile device. In urban and some suburban areas, mobiles are typically in contact with three or more base stations. Here, the accuracy of the position fix is largely determined by the quality of the synchronization pulses and the presence of multipath conditions. In other words, the greater the building density in an urban area, the poorer the accuracy of the position fix. To further complicate matters, mobiles are typically in contact with fewer than three base stations in rural areas, making triangulation difficult if not impossible.
GPS-based methods are considered complementary to base station triangulation methods, because they address areas where triangulation methods fall short. For example, conventional GPS performs very well in suburban and rural areas, where the view of the sky is unobstructed. Enhanced GPS may also perform better in dense urban areas where there are severe multipath conditions, as GPS is a dynamic system with constantly moving satellites. Additionally, several methods have been proposed and tested that would greatly increase the accuracy of GPS. In the final analysis, the wireless telecom industry has decided that some combination of methods will be deployed to locate mobile phones, with enhanced GPS being a longer-term, universal solution. The enhanced GPS systems can require no cell site modification and can take advantage of enhancements to handsets and by upgrading location server capabilty. One drawback to the enhanced GPS infrastructure is that it passes the cost of location technology to the device
vendors, whereas with radio triangulation, the service provider absorbes the cost of the infrastructure.
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