The next generation of location-based services

RCR Wireless
June 7th, 2010

In emergencies, people find themselves in immediate need of assistance anywhere, anytime. The ability of a public-safety agency to accurately, reliably and rapidly locate the individual in any environment, irrespective of the settings and capabilities of the person's mobile device can mean the difference between life and death.

The stakes in commercial location-based services (LBS) are considerably less, and, until now, so were the capabilities. However, innovative "pattern-matching" technologies - refined and hardened in mission-critical public-safety applications such as emergency response, government security and law enforcement - are being extended to commercial LBS. Breakthroughs in how precisely, quickly and reliably mobile devices can be pinpointed are set to transform the LBS user experience.

In the upgrade to 3G and 4G networks, operators are looking at how to reap new benefits from their mandated investment in E911 capabilities by differentiating commercial offerings with enhanced enterprise and consumer LBS.

Commercial LBS are available on mobile phones today, but their value is typically limited to turn-by-turn navigation and points of interest or user-initiated mobile search.

The problem is that many of the technologies that underlie today's LBS offerings are unable to locate a mobile-phone user precisely, quickly or reliably in challenging environments, such as urban centers and indoors. Cell-ID/Enhanced Cell-ID (ECID), for example, can determine only approximate locations of handsets based on crude location information from cell towers. Assisted Global Position System (A-GPS) can provide more precise locations for users in suburban and rural areas, but it is unable to function reliably where line of sight is obstructed, such as indoors or dense urban environments, and must often fall back to other, less-precise technologies. And even though Wi-Fi might occasionally deliver sufficient accuracy outdoors, it suffers from location dead zones indoors; plus, it must be available and activated on user handsets, which significantly restricts the potential footprint of a service.

To attract a new wave of interest from business customers or consumers, next-generation commercial LBS must be able to rapidly and precisely locate any and all users automatically where people live and work - inside places like office buildings, shopping malls and homes. In the gathering commercial LBS marketplace, indoors and urban areas are where it's at.

Network-based pattern-matching technology, a software-based location method, operates in fundamentally different ways than do the other technologies. To determine the user's location, signal strength data, time delays and other network measurements that are relayed through the wireless network are compared against a database of predicted values. A given mobile device's signature values are unique and, therefore, can be identified and located accordingly. Pattern matching operates without regard to subscriber setting of services (Wi-Fi on/off, GPS on/off, etc.), and no additional hardware is required in operator networks or user devices. From the smartest of the smart phones to the dumbest of the dumb handsets, pattern-matching software can ubiquitously locate devices across an operator's entire subscriber base.

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