The Wireless Internet Explained
Learn to understand technologies and standards of wireless computing as they relate to the Internet.
TABLE OF CONTENTS The Wireless Internet Explained
5.8: Increasing the value
5.8 Increasing the value
The potential of wireless networks is continually increasing. As applications begin to take advantage of this evolution they too will begin to offer new kinds of functionality.
5.8.1 Location-based services
One advantage of mobile devices over PCs is the possibility to determine the user's location and provide location-based data, which provides a means of automatically targeting relevant information.
There are numerous applications that can benefit from this information, including the following:
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Interactive maps and driving directions
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Location-dependent contact information
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Location-dependent travel information
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E-commerce proximate store/bank/restaurant/gas station locations
Wide area services
The most prominent type of location-based services is potentially global in scale. It offers only limited precision (e.g., 100 m), but this is sufficient for many types of applications. For example, it can give optimized information about flights, as well as addresses, local traffic information, directions and maps of restaurants, pharmacies, cash dispensers, gas stations, parking garages, and hotels, to name just a few.
There are two different approaches that can be used to extract location information of this granularity: GPS and carrier integration.
GPS can provide global coverage independent of the particular air-interface that is being used. The mobile unit must be equipped with a GPS receiver and pass its coordinates to the server application. The server can then supply information that is specific to the location of the user.
Wireless infrastructure providers, such as mobile operators, also have information on the location of a given user at any point in time. They can derive it...
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