Location-based services: advances and challenges

Since the US FCC issued an order in July 1996, requiring mobile operators to provide wireless emergency services to its customers, we have continuously witnessed an evolving breed of mobile positioning technologies. The mobile network operators, eager in seeking new and innovative ways to create differentiation and increase profits, envisaged potential new services with the mobile position information. One of the best ways to accomplish this is through the delivery of highly personalized services based on location. This has proved to be very illusive to researchers at large and up to date we are still waiting to see when the first commercial and large scale location based services (LBS) can be readily and economically available to customers. In this paper, we discuss the research issues involved in the development of LBS; describe recent work done in this area in our department at Hanover University. We finally outline some of the unmet research challenges, including highly accuracy mobile positioning techniques, roaming and billing issues, interoperability between operators (both national and international) and privacy or security problems associated with LBS.