Location-based Service - LBS Applications

LBS Applications

Some examples of location-based services are:

• Recommending social events in a city
• Requesting the nearest business or service, such as an ATM or restaurant
• Turn by turn navigation to any address
• Locating people on a map displayed on the mobile phone
• Receiving alerts, such as notification of a sale on gas or warning of a traffic jam
• Location-based mobile advertising
• Asset recovery combined with active RF to find, for example, stolen assets in containers where GPS would not work
• Games where your location is part of the game play, for example your movements during your day make your avatar move in the game or your position unlocks content.
• Real-time Q&A revolving around restaurants, services, and other venues

More examples are listed in.

For the carrier, location-based services provide added value by enabling services such as:

• Resource tracking with dynamic distribution. Taxis, service people, rental equipment, doctors, fleet scheduling.
• Resource tracking. Objects without privacy controls, using passive sensors or RF tags, such as packages and train boxcars.
• Finding someone or something. Person by skill (doctor), business directory, navigation, weather, traffic, room schedules, stolen phone, emergency calls.
• Proximity-based notification (push or pull). Targeted advertising, buddy list, common profile matching (dating).
• Proximity-based actuation (push or pull). Payment based upon proximity (EZ pass, toll watch), automatic airport check-in.

In the U.S. the FCC requires that all carriers meet certain criteria for supporting location-based services (FCC 94–102). The mandate requires 95% of handsets to resolve within 300 meters for network-based tracking (e.g. triangulation) and 150 meters for handset-based tracking (e.g. GPS). This can be especially useful when dialing an emergency telephone number – such as enhanced 9-1-1 in North America, or 112 in Europe – so that the operator can dispatch emergency services such as Emergency Medical Services, police or firefighters to the correct location. CDMA and iDEN operators have chosen to use GPS location technology for locating emergency callers. This led to rapidly increasing penetration of GPS in iDEN and CDMA handsets in North America and other parts of the world where CDMA is widely deployed. Even though no such rules are yet in place in Japan or in Europe the number of GPS-enabled GSM/WCDMA handset models is growing fast. According to the independent wireless analyst firm Berg Insight the attach rate for GPS is growing rapidly in GSM/WCDMA handsets, from less than 8% in 2008 to 15% in 2009.

European operators are mainly using Cell-ID for locating subscribers. This is also a method used in Europe by companies that are using cell based LBS as part of systems to recover stolen assets. In the US companies such as Rave Wireless in New York are using GPS and triangulation to enable college students to notify campus police when they are in trouble. Rave Wireless and other companies with location based offerings are powered by a variety of companies, including Skyhook Wireless and Xtify.