Monday, October 7, 2013

Mobile Tracking Strategies

Technology Made for Emergency Response Can Be Used for Tracking Smartphones. Cell tracking, mobile GPS and cell phone tracker applications are unquestionably getting a lot of curiosity from potential buyers, cell phone businesses and software coders. The up-to-date mobiles integrate GPS locator functionality to track mobile phone position.


 Phone Tracking


In order to adhere to Federal Communications Commission rules, cell phone companies are required to be in a position to provide authorities with device latitude and longitude to an accuracy of 50 to 300 meters. Cell Tower Triangulation will not always meet this condition. By way of evaluation, commercially accessible GPS modules are able to realize accuracy down to 3-10m. This relies on a lot of factors, as GPS signals tend to be rather weak and are impacted by many factors. With Mobile Location Services (MLS), the GSM cell network provider uses triangulation techniques to compute the location of the handset, its accuracy is proven to be much worse than that of GPS. MLS is also impacted by factors similar to GPS in the sense of the barriers affecting signal quality 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 describes whenever the GPS enabled handset retains its last identified position, the satellites which were in range before, as well as the almanac data in memory, and makes an attempt to connect to the same satellites and calculate a new position based upon the previous data. 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 switched off. GPS Warm Start refers to whenever the GPS enabled handset keeps its last known position, and almanac used, but not which satellites were in range. It performs a reset and attempts to lock onto satellite signals and computes the latest position. The GPS receiver narrows the choice of which satellites toseek since it stored its last known location and also the almanac data helps identify which satellites are in range. The Warm Start will take longer compared to Hot Start but not as much as a Cold Start. With GPS Cold Start, the device deletes all the previous data, and tries to find sa


tellites and obtain a GPS lock. This will take the longest since there is no known reference information. The GPS enabled cell phone receiver must attempt to lock onto a satellite transmission from any available satellites.


In order to have better GPS lock times cell phone manufacturers and wireless operators designed Assisted GPS technology. This downloads the ephemeris helping triangulate the mobile phone basic position. GPS Receivers can get a quicker lock in exchange for a few kilobytes of data transmission. Assisted GPS, also referred to as A-GPS or AGPS, improves the performance of standard GPS in devices connected to the cellular network. In the United States Sprint, Nextel, Verizon Wireless, and Alltel all use A-GPS. Which is a method of using the cellular network to speed up acquisition of GPS satellites.


A-GPS improves location tracking performance of mobile phones (and other related devices) in two ways:


The first way will be helping to secure a more rapid “time to first fix” (TTFF). A-GPS receives and stores information regarding the location of satellites using the cell network and so the location details does not require to be downloaded via the satellite.


The other technique is by helping locate cell phones when GPS signals are weak or not available. Since GPS satellite signals may be interfered with by tall buildings, and do not penetrate building interiors well Assisted GPS employs proximity to cellular towers to calculate position when GPS signals are not available.


When satellite signals are not obtainable, or accuracy is less important than battery life, employing Cell-ID is a viable alternative to GPS smartphone location. The location of the handset can be estimated by the cellular network cell id, that determines the cell tower the mobile phone is using. By knowing the position of the tower, you’ll be able to know approximately where the mobile phone is. Nonetheless, a tower can cover an enormous area, from a couple of hundred meters, in higher populationdensity locations, to several kilometers in lower density areas. For this reason location CellID accuracy is lower than GPS accuracy. Having said that tracking using CellID still offers a truly good substitute.


Another way of formulating handset position is Triangulation or Mobile Location Services (MLS). Cell Tower Triangulation employs signal analysis data to calculate the time it takes signals traveling from the mobile phone to no less than 3 cell towers to judge position.


Mobile Tracking Strategies

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