Thursday, October 31, 2013

Do you truly know exactly where your Mobile Workforce or Children are?

Technologies Intended for Emergency Response Can Be Employed for Keeping Track of Your Spouse. GPS tracking, cell phone GPS and cell phone track software are unquestionably attracting notice from consumers, cell phone businesses and application creators. The hottest smartphones integrate GPS locator attributes to track telephone location.


 Mobile Tracking


To abide by Federal Communications Commission guidelines, cell phone companies are required to be able to supply authorities with device latitude and longitude to an accuracy of 50 to 300 meters. Cell Tower Triangulation isn’t going to always satisfy this requirement. For comparison, commercially available GPS systems can certainly realize precision down to 3-10m. This depends upon a lot of factors, as GPS signals are often pretty weak and they are disturbed by numerous variables. With Mobile Location Services (MLS), the GSM cell network provider uses triangulation algorithms to calculate the location of the cell phone, its accuracy is proven to be less than than that of GPS. MLS is further affected by factors similar to GPS in the sense of the interference affecting signal strength and the density of GSM towers to help in the triangulation calculation. In rural areas position accuracy may be off as much as a mile.


GPS Hot Start is the term for when the GPS enabled cell phone remembers its last known location, the satellites that were in range at the time, together with the almanac data in memory, and attempts to connect to the same satellites and determine a fresh position based upon the previous information. This is usually the quickest GPS lock but Hot Start only works if the phone is in the same general area as when the GPS was last turned off. GPS Warm Start describes whenever the GPS enabled device keeps its last calculated location, and almanac used, but not which satellites were in view. It resets and makes an attempt to find satellite signals and calculates a whole new location. The GPS receiver has a general idea of which satellites tolook for since it saved its last known location and the almanac data helps identify which satellites are within view. The Warm Start will take more time compared to Hot Start although not as much as a Cold Start. With GPS Cold Start, the device dumps all the previous data, and tries to find satellites and obtain a GPS lock. This normally takes the longest since there is no known reference information. The GPS enabled device receiver has to attempt to lock onto a satellite signal from any accessible satellites.


So as to have better GPS lock times cellular phone manufacturers and telco operators introduced Assisted GPS technology. This downloads the ephemeris helping triangulate the mobile phone basic location. GPS Receivers will get a faster lock in exchange for a few kilobytes of data transmission. Assisted GPS, also referred to as A-GPS or AGPS, enhances the performance of standard GPS in mobile phones connected to the cellular network. In the US Sprint, Nextel, Verizon Wireless, and Alltel all use AGPS. This is a means of using the cellular network to accelerate acquisition of GPS satellites.


A-GPS assists location tracking functions of cell phones (as well as other related devices) in a couple of ways:


The first way is by helping to get a more rapid “time to first fix” (TTFF). Assisted GPS gets and stores data in relation to the location of satellites using the cellular network and so the position data does not require to be downloaded from the the satellite.


Another way is by assisting locate smartphones when GPS signals are weak or blocked. Due to the fact GPS satellite signals may be impeded by tall buildings, and do not penetrate building interiors well AGPS employs distance to cellular towers to calculate position when GPS signals are not readily available.


When satellite signals are not readily available, or precision is less important than life of the battery, utilizing Cell-ID is a good substitute to GPS smartphone location. The location of the device might be determined by the cell network cell id, that determines the cell tower the smartphone is using. By knowing the position of this tower, you may know roughly the spot where the smartphone will be. But, a tower can cover a massive area, from a few hundred meters, in higher populationdensity zones, to a few miles in lower density zones. This is why location CellID precision is lower than GPS accuracy. Even so tracking via CellID still gives you a truly helpful alternative.


Another method of calculating device location is Triangulation or Mobile Location Services (MLS). Cell Tower Triangulation uses signal analysis data to determine the time it takes signals to travel from the mobile phone to at least 3 cell towers to estimate position.



Do you truly know exactly where your Mobile Workforce or Children are?

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