Mobile Mapping: challenges and limitations


U. Srinivas1, S. M. C. Chagla2, Dr. V. N. Sharma3
InfoTech Enterprises Limited, Plot # 11, Software Unit Layout
Infocity, Madhapur, Hyderabad – 500 035
srini@infotech.stph.net1, chagla@infotech.stph.net2, sharma_vempaty@infotech.stph.net3


Convergence of Internet and Media like Voice and video are opening lot of services to the Mobile user. Mobile mapping is the latest and probably one of the most useful of these services. It has myriad uses and plays a pivotal role in the GIS-information dissipating systems. WAP and other wireless standards enable multidimensional access to the map information and are in the forefront of latest mobile mapping technology . The information is made available on mobile devices like WAP Phones, PDAs, Pagers and even ordinary telephones.

Mobile Mapping Infrastructure and architecture
There are different terminals by which the GIS information can be accessed. They are namely Wireless Phones, PDA’s and Land Phones. The principle behind the transmission of GIS content to various terminals is briefed below.


Fig. 1: Access of GIS information on Monile Terminals


Wireless Phones
There are different types of Wireless phones like WAP, GPRS, Imode, PDA’s. They differ in the Wireless Network they use and each of them may have a different methodology to access Map-Information as briefly described below.

WAP Phones
For WAP based mapping solutions, a web server is required that hosts the Mapping Application, has the map database, other components for routing/voice recognition etc (Fig.1). A WAP Gateway is required to transfer information between the Mobile terminal and the web/content server. The Gateway essentially does the protocol conversion, encoding and decoding. A WML browser on the WAP device displays Map and other text based results (Routing results etc).

GPRS Phones
If the GPRS device user is requesting for HTML based map information then the architecture as shown in Fig. 2 will be followed, if the user is requesting WAP based map information than the architecture will be as shown in Fig.1. The only difference being that the wireless network is a Packet switched data network instead of Circuit switched data network, which needs a dial-up.


Fig. 2: Accessing Map content on devices that can connect to the Internet


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