E-911 location standards and location commercial services

Mobile location positioning technologies, initially developed in answer to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) E-911 requirement have become an increasingly important topic in the standards development group. The U.S. FCC has mandated that by October 2001, mobile callers to E-911 must be located to within a certain accuracy level (i.e., 50 m in 67% of cases and 150 m in 95% of cases for handset-based location solution). This requirement, coupled with the consumer demand for location commercial services, has driven the cellular industry to research promising positioning techniques and new location value-added services. The E-OTD method has been accepted in the E-911 phase of GSM system location standards. Almost at the same time, the GPS-based location standard, IS-801, has also been developed for cdma2000. While much of the emphasis has been on the development of location technologies to comply with the E-911 ruling, another important area for consideration is the emergence of location value-added services. When the mobile information is received, it may be used within the systems to (1) improve the system performance in the different layers of the systems and (2) increase wireless system functionality for location commercial services.