Monday, October 28, 2013

Do you truly know where your Mobile Workforce or Family are?

Cell tracking, mobile GPS and mobile phone tracking applications are unquestionably securing curiosity from consumers, cellular telephone companies and program developers. The most popular mobiles contain GPS locator functionality to track cellphone position.


 Phone Tracking


To help conform to Federal Communications Commission rules, cellular phone companies have to be able to give authorities with mobile phone latitude and longitude to an precision of 50 to 300 meters. Cell Tower Triangulation is not going to always meet this requirement. By way of comparison, commercially accessible GPS modules can certainly acquire precision down to 3-10m. This varies according to a lot of factors, as GPS signals are often rather weak and are impacted by numerous variables. With Mobile Location Services (MLS), the GSM cellular network provider utilizes triangulation algorithms to estimate the location of the smartphone, its accuracy is proven to be much worse than that of GPS. MLS is further impacted by factors similar to GPS in the sense of the barriers affecting signal quality and the density of GSM towers to assist in the triangulation effort. In remote areas location accuracy may be off as much as a mile.


GPS Hot Start refers to when the GPS enabled device remembers its last calculated position, the satellites that were in range at the time, as well as the almanac data in memory, and makes an attempt to connect to the same satellites and calculate a brand new position based upon the previous data. This is usually the quickest GPS lock but Hot Start only works if the phone is generally in the same location as when the GPS was last switched off. GPS Warm Start is when the GPS enabled smartphone keeps its last calculated position, and almanac used, but not which satellites were in view. It resets and makes an attempt to lock onto satellite signals and computes a brand new location. The GPS receiver narrows the choice of which satellites toseek because it stored its last known position and also the almanac data helps determine which satellites are visible in the sky. The Warm Start will take longer than the Hot Start but not as long as a Cold Start. With GPS Cold Start, the device dumps all the previous information, and tries to find satellites and complete a GPS lock. This usually takes longer than other methods because there is no known reference data. The GPS enabled handset receiver must try to lock onto a satellite signal from any accessible satellites.


So as to have improved GPS lock times cellular phone manufacturers and wireless operators designed Assisted GPS technology. It downloads the ephemeris helping triangulate the device general position. GPS Receivers can get a faster lock at the expense of a few kilobytes of data transmission. Assisted GPS, often known as A-GPS or AGPS, increases the performance of normal GPS in handsets connected to the cellular network. In the US Sprint, Nextel, Verizon Wireless, and Alltel all use AGPS. Which is a means of utilizing the cellular network to speed up acquisition of GPS satellites.


A-GPS assists location tracking functions of mobile phones (along with other connected devices) in a couple of ways:


One method will be helping to obtain a faster “time to first fix” (TTFF). Assisted GPS acquires and stores data concerning the location of satellites utilizing the cell network and so the location details does not require to be downloaded via the satellite.


A subsequent process is by helping locate mobile phones when GPS signals are weak or not available. Since GPS satellite signals may be impeded by tall buildings, and do not pass through building interiors well AGPS utilizes proximity to cellular towers to approximate location when GPS signals are not available.


In the event that satellite signals are not readily available, or accuracy and precision is less important than life of the battery, employing Cell-ID is a viable alternative to GPS smartphone location. The location of the smartphone can be calculated by the cellular network cell id, which pinpoints the cell tower the mobile phone is connected to. By knowing the position of this tower, you may know approximately where the cell phone might be. However, a tower can cover a huge area, from a couple of hundred meters, in higher populationdensity zones, to a few miles in lower density zones. This is why location CellID accuracy is less than than GPS accuracy. Nevertheless location via CellID still gives you a truly good alternative.


Another method of calculating handset location is Triangulation or Mobile Location Services (MLS). Cell Tower Triangulation employs signal analysis data to calculate the time it takes signals to travel from the mobile phone to a minimum of three cell towers to estimate position.



Do you truly know where your Mobile Workforce or Family are?

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