The system applications of novel methods of location and tracking of cellular mobiles

With the ever increasing calls to the emergency services being made from cellular phones, projected to be 130,000 calls per day by the end of this century in the USA alone, safety (and security) is the prime factor in determining the user's location, especially when 25% of these users do not know their location when placing the call or have difficulty in describing their exact location. Knowledge of one's position also enables and facilitates other diverse applications such as: accident reporting, roadside assistance, fraud detection, automated billing, navigational services, vehicle position location, fleet management and cargo tracking. On the more ominous side, people/vehicle tracking can be enabled though this has the beneficial application of being able to locate a lost child, potential terrorists and thieves including vehicle recovery or be of use in traffic management systems. The knowledge of cellular traffic density with the added knowledge of positional information will enable the wireless providers to optimise cellular coverage areas and introduce intra-cellular zonal billing in order to control traffic and or generate extra revenue. Engineering benefits include the accurate placement of new cell sites, an improvement in the response time to solve traffic engineering and RF interference problems, improvement of the call quality, reduction in dropped and blocked calls and an improvement in customer service. This paper describes these applications in greater detail, including the current commercial implementations and applications of cellular location technology.