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Location Based Services for – Moving from GSM to UMTS

Anthony S. PARK, Steffen LIPPERTS, and Marc WILHELM

Kompazz was the first location based service to be introduced Abstract -- Location-based services are becoming a key feature to the German mobile market. It will be shown how Kompazz to provide tailor-made mobile applications in networks. allows to integrate other aspects of context awareness. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts involved and present Kompazz, the first location-based service in Germany, a mobile shopping guide. As a first-mover in these markets, we show how II. CONTEXT AWARENESS context-awareness can extend location-based services and how About a decade ago, context-awareness of applications first this can evolve in UMTS. emerged. It was intended to allow applications to exploit contextual information concerning a mobile user. This Index Terms -- Location based Services, Context-awareness, WAP, Kompazz © information for instance included user location, environment, and the current activity of the user. I. INTRODUCTION which was introduced by Olivetti Research Ltd. and the Xerox PARC Laboratory [1] became a driving factor for research in obile applications offered by today’s and promised by context awareness. tomorrow’s mobile world hold several advantages and M As context thus comprises a variety of parameters, a clear benefits for the user. The main benefits to be mentioned here – definition and structure of context is required in order to in addition to mobility itself – are ubiquity and reachability – identify and provide context-aware applications. Schilit et al. “anytime, anywhere” – as well as convenience and connecti- in 1993 stated that context-aware computing requires software vity. Due to these new and improved features of mobile that “adapts according to its location of use, the collection of devices and applications, the mobile markets in the past few nearby people and objects, as well as changes to those objects years have seen a remarkable boom, and despite the current over time” [2]. Accordingly, context can be defined as “the set economic situation, mobile applications will continue to form of environmental states and settings that either determine an an important and expanding industry in the future. application’s behaviour or in which an application event A key aspect for the mobility of these applications is given by occurs and is interesting to the user” [3]. the ability to determine the user’s location. Location based Schilit et al. in [4] introduced a categorisation of contexts services allow to offer value-added services to the user, which was extended by [3]. Such a categorisation helps to depending on their current geographic position. Today, a range narrow the spectrum of involved parameters for specific of location based services already exists. But for future mobile context-aware applications, thus forming the conceptual basis applications is will be of great importance to offer more than for context-aware applications. The categorisation is explained just location based services. Particularly, in order to make in the following. UMTS a success, applications will be required which offer additional value to the user, extending the capabilities of A. Categorisation of Contexts today’s GSM solutions. However, rather than reinventing the 1) Computing Context wheel, location based services existing today can be taken as The computing context comprises all device-related basis for new mobile applications. An important class of characteristics and current states of all devices involved in a applications can be derived form location based services by context-aware application, e.g. a mobile device’s operating extending location-awareness to context-awareness. system, its display, processing power, and its current battery This papers is structured as follows. In the next section we will status, or available network connectivity and current discuss context awareness, particularly the parameters bandwidth. Although the current focus is on mobile devices, involved, and we will present some example context-aware the computing context refers to other, non-mobile devices. applications. Section 3 focuses on location as one particular Information on computing devices like access terminals and parameter of context awareness. Location awareness to date printers which are located in near range of a mobile user has found most interest and use. Section 4 takes a look at the belong to the computing context too, as well as billing economical background and perspectives of context and information for accessing the communication network and for location aware services. In section 5, Kompazz © is presented. using these devices, respectively. 2

2) Physical Context continuously measured and evaluated. Moreover, the The physical context comprises parameters which describe parameters also differ in range of values and in granularity. the current physical surroundings of the user. This can involve Therefore, when developing and implementing context-aware information concerning lighting, noise level, humidity, and applications, one needs to clearly specify which contexts are temperature. involved and how the corresponding data are to be collected 3) Time Context and evaluated. Some example context-aware applications and In addition to the current time, the time context can also the context information they exploit are described next. hold date information, like week day, month, year, and even C. Context-Aware Applications – Some Examples season. 4) User context In the early stages, context awareness was exploited for Other than the computing and physical context, which hold indoor applications and involved specific devices for locating information on the devices and the user’s environment, the users. With the help of badges carried by users, teleporting user context holds information on the current situation of the could for example be realised, i.e. the dynamic mapping of user herself, and of surrounding users. Parameters of the user user interfaces to resources such as workstations which context thus are user profiles, medical data describing the currently are in the user’s proximity [5]. Another example for user’s health, user location, and fellow users in the immediate an early context aware applications were active maps which vicinity. displayed the current location of employees in an office building with the help of badges [6]. Based on a badge system, B. Context Evaluation too, an automatic call forwarding to the closest phone could be Applications can exploit the above contexts in two basic realised [7]. ways. In the following, this will be shown for an example However, it soon became apparent that location information parameter, namely user location. alone was not sufficient to provide a suitable service to the 1) Contextual information users. For instance, users might not want to be localised by an According to the context parameters taken into active map application or they might prefer not to have private consideration, different information is presented to the user, calls being forwarded to the office of their boss, when they potentially in different ways. Taking the example of user were there for a meeting. These examples show that different location, a mobile user equipped with a WAP-phone might types of context information can be required for a system to request for cash machines in her vicinity. Depending on the behave reasonably. Depending on the type of incoming call or current location, not only different information will be the current activity of a user, a localisation or call forwarding delivered to the user, namely a list containing nearby cash should be suppressed. machines, but depending on the number of relevant cash While a number of other context aware applications machines, either a full list may be displayed or a partial list emerged which operated in an indoor environment and mainly with an option to see more entries. Recommendations on how with location information, context awareness was carried to the to get to a cash machine can be displayed if no cash machine is outdoor, e.g. with Cyberguide, a tourist guide system [8], or found in the predefined range. Given a list of cash machines, Fieldwork, a set of tools for fieldworker’s observation and this list can also be sorted according to other context data-collection activities which takes the fieldworker’s information, e.g. according to the preferred bank stored in the location and the current time into account [9]. user’s profile, or according to a proximate selection, i.e. the Comprehensive surveys of context aware applications can closest cash machine is displayed first. be found in [10] and [3]. As a result of these surveys it was 2) Context-triggered Actions observed that few contexts other than location were used other Not only applications based on pull-communication as in the examined context-aware applications. As another result, described above can benefit from context-awareness. Context- it was stated that no “killer application” for context-aware aware applications can also adapt to information being computing was found, i.e. no application which had the delivered in push-style. Depending on the user location – as potential to be deployed in a large-scale commercial product. example context information – a tourist information Most of the examined applications used small pieces of application running on a mobile device could download contextual information and they all existed in a pure research information on specific sights, with this process being environment, i.e. they are not widely available to everyday triggered e.g. by a special message transmitted via cell- users. broadcast. In the following we will show, how location has been used With regard to the diversity of the parameters belonging to as key context for developing Kompazz©, a mobile shopping the four context types discussed above, it is obvious to see that guide, which was the first location based service to be they have different demands concerning update frequencies. introduced to the German mobile market. With the Take for instance a user profile containing information on the proliferation of mobile telephony and mobile devices, a social status of a user. Whereas this information needs to be different basis has been created which allows to make use of updated only after long periods of time, e.g. if the user takes context-awareness commercially. It will furthermore be on a new job, medical data such as the user’s pulse needs to be outlined, how in addition to location, other contexts have been 3 used to improve personalization and usability of Kompazz and mobile operator and third party providers. Basically, there are how this will be extended in the future. First, the concepts of four different types of such applications, which are shown in location awareness are explained in more detail for a better figure 2. understanding. Wireless Location Services

III. LOCATION BASED SERVICES End User Assistance Trigger Services In the previous section it has been shown – especially with Services the discussion of existing context-aware applications – that Automated Advertising Emergancy Service location to date is the most important context information. In Services Notification the following, we will focus on mobile users with mobile Location Sensitive Roadside Assistence phones and discuss location- and context-aware application in Billing this context. Different possible ways of locating mobile users in GSM 3rd Party Tracking Location Based networks exist. These locating mechanisms are displayed in Services Information Services "Where am I?" / table 1. It can be seen that the different mechanisms widely People Finding vary with regard to indoor accessibility, required efforts of "Where is..?" Services Vehicle Traffic and mobile devices and the wired backbone, and particularly with Fleet Management regard to precision. Services TABLE 1 Misc. Information Asset Tracking USER LOCATION IN GSM NETWORKS Services Effort for Mobile Modification of ETSI Standards Precision Indoor Access Operator Mobile Device Fig. 2: Types of Wireless Location Services COO + TA rd (Cell of Origin and 70m – 30km yes low software update Whilst trigger services, 3 party tracking services, and end Timing Advance) TOA user assistance services all contain promising new service, the 60m – 150m yes very high software update (Time of Arrival) focus here will be on location based information services. Any E-OTD (Enhanced 60m – 200m yes medium required application taking both the users position, and the position of a Observed Time Difference) point of interest into account and providing the user with A-GPS 10m – 50m reduced high required related information, belongs to this class of wireless location (Assisted GPS) Non-Standard service. Location based information services allow to SAT new SIM cards (SIM Application 50m – 200m yes low introduce personalized services which offer added value to the required Toolkit) customers. Before describing one particular location based Source: ETSI; Cambridge Positioning Systems information service, namely Kompazz, the mobile shopping Currently, the position of mobile users is determined by guide, in more detail, an outlook on the economic perspective evaluating the user’s cell-ID (i.e. cell of origin), because this of wireless location services in general will be given, in order mechanisms involved the lowest effort for mobile operators. to outline the commercial importance which was missing for However, this mechanism also has the drawback of providing the context-aware applications discussed above. the widest range results. The quality of the positioning in this case varies widely and depends on the given cell geometry. IV. ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE OF However, with the introduction of 3rd generation networks, the WIRELESS LOCATION SERVICE positioning with this mechanism will improve considerably Wireless location services as discussed here are based on due to the better and diversified cell structure, which is WAP applications. To date, WAP has not been very important depicted in figure 1. economically. However, this is changing. Expected Development of WAP Market in Germany

Global 70 60 Suburban 50 Urban 40 In-Building 30

Pico-Cell 20 Micro-Cell Macro-Cell 10 0 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 Fig. 1: Cell Types in UMTS Percentage of WAP enabled Mobile Phones WAP Users (in Millions) Given the location information of the mobile user, a variety Fig. 3: Future Development WAP Market in Germany; Source: Ovum Global of wireless location services can be offered to this user by the Mobile Markets August 2001 4

This development is supported by the study presented in figure 3. This study indicated that not only the absolute number of WAP-enabled phones will increase considerably in the next four year, but also the percentage of users willing to use WAP services. Location based services form an important factor in this context. A study by Lehman Brothers has carried out in December 1999 has determined that 67 % of mobile user will use location based services. GMS Consult GmbH in October 2000 increased this prognosis to 83 per cent. Against this background, the importance for location information can be seen and figure 4 estimates the resulting part of mobile applications which will use location information.

Percentage of LBS enabled Mobile Applications Fig. 5: Expected Users of Mobile Internet 70 It can thus be seen that context awareness and particularly 60 location awareness is an important factor for the mobile 50 Internet which is about to become a far more important 40 economic domain than it already is today. It is important to see 30 that context-aware services, offering extended and augmented services to the mobile user, can evolve from location based 20 services, which are important today and which will be of 10 particular importance in the next few years as boosting factor 0 for the mobile Internet. In the following section, Kompazz, 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 Germany’s first location based WAP-service, will be Fig. 4: Future Development of Mobile Applications Using Location Based Services; Source Ericsson Consulting GmbH 2001 introduced and it will be shown how Kompazz enables the extension of location awareness to context awareness. Despite the fact, that today already 50 million WAP-enabled mobile phones exist worldwide, the current acceptance of V. KOMPAZZ ©-GERMANY’S FIRST WAP is comparably low. As table 2 explains by comparing LOCATION BASED SERVICE WAP with i-mode, various aspects such as price structure, Early in 2000, the first location based services emerged. display, and especially content have caused the mobile internet NTT Docomo with DoKoNavi in Japan and Telia in Sweden in form of WAP-based services today to be less successful with It’s alive! were amongst the first movers world wide, as than the counterpart i-mode. However, it can also be seen that they installed these location based services in January 2000. in combination with GPRS and improved mobile devices Other important location based services and their installation appearing on the market today, the required changes which date are shown in table 3. will allow WAP to spread are being made. TABLE 3 TABLE 2 LOCATION BASED SERVICES –WORLD WIDE CHARACTERISTICS OF I-MODE AND WAP Mobile Operator LBS i-mode WAP GSM WAP GPRS NTT Docomo, January 2000 DoKoNavi (today) Japan J-Phone, May 2000 J-Navi Speed (Kbps) 9.6 9.6 Up to 115 Telia, June 2000 Delivery Packet Switch Circuit Switch Packet Switch Sweden It’s Alive! Tele2, October 2000 Price Structure Volume Based Per-Minute Volume Based Finland Sonera, Autumn 2000 Pointer Guide Display Colour Monochrome Colour EMT, March 2001 PinPoint Estonia Graphics and Yes Limited Yes Eesti Mobil, May 2000 SOS 112 Animation Vodafone, Winter 2001 Vivazzi Find & Seek UK Content Wide Selection Limited Growing BT Cellnet, Winter 2001 FINDme Selection Standard Proprietary Open Standard Open Standard In Germany, the first location based service was installed in Interoperability No Yes Yes October 2000 with Kompazz, the mobile shopping guide. Kompazz was placed in D2 Vodafone’s Portal as automatic In Japan, i-mode has sown how the mobile Internet can evolve. location based service and was accessible to millions of users. According to Takeshi Natsuno, responsible for i-mode at NT In 2001, many other location based services emerged, see DoCoMo, early in 2002, NT DoCoMo will overtake AOL as leading Internet provider with over 30 million costumers in table 4, outlining the importance of location information. They Japan alone. With regard to the changing factors described allow the user to spot banks, gas stations, taxis, etc. above, this development will also take place for a WAP- To date, location based services have emerged in most enabled mobile Internet. Figure 5 shows how the mobile countries offering added values to the customer. internet is expected to evolve in Germany in the next years. This process has been boosted by two factors: 5

Penetration: In Germany, for example, today more than 70 product introduction. per cent of the population possess a mobile phone, far more The user can also search and browse location-specific than a personal computer. information on stores, products and brands. Whereas this Connectivity: With GPRS becoming increasingly popular, a information is static or merely adopted to the user’s profile in constant connectivity of the mobile customers is realized accesses via WWW, this is a location based service when (“always on”) which allows to create new kinds of mobile accessed via WAP. applications. This is supported by the fact that user usually In the latter case, the user will issue a request via the WAP carry along their mobile phones most of the time. gateway. The Kompazz server will then localise the mobile Against this background, location awareness – in addition to user as shown in figure 7. The request and the resulting the benefits for the customers discussed in detail in section two product information can now be matched with the location – now has found the economic background for companies to information, thus allowing e.g. to narrow the number of invest into the provisioning of location based services. relevant products and shops to those available in close range.

TABLE 4 LOCATION BASED SERVICES –GERMANY Mobile Operator LBS based WAP Applications Installation of Service Kompazz October 2000 D2 Vodafone Passo, Aral, Tourisline, D2- Q2 2001 Shopfinder Taxi,Hotel,Weather,Clever D1 T-Mobil Winter 2001 Tanken Location Finder from E-Plus Airflash, Location Server by Q2 2001 Cellpoint Viag Intercom Location Finder from Airflash Cebit 2001

Kompazz is a shopping service which is accessible via Fig. 7: Information Flow in Kompazz WWW – via a regular portal and a portal optimised for PDAs – and via WAP. Kompazz presents widely ranging shopping However, this purely location based service, which relies on information for brick & mortar stores to the user in a user location information, can be extended by other user convenient and easy-to-use manner. The product categories context information (see categories of contexts in section 2), amongst other comprise entertainment, fashion, mobile e.g. by information contained in the user profile. The user can phones, music, organiser, and sports, and participating stores for instance determine which distance of shops from her are located in all larger German cities. A bonus system for current location are still of interest to her, thus specifying the SMS recommendation and comments and assessments of geographical area of relevance. products provide additional user information, but also user The computing context can also be taken into account to benefit. enhance the pure location based service by context awareness. Device-related characteristics like size of display and computing power can be used to provide tailor made information to the user. If e.g. the mobile device has a suitable display and if the network bandwidth and throughput is sufficient, then product descriptions including pictures and small animations can be transmitted to the user, whereas limitation like given by today’s mobile phones can be met by pure textual descriptions. The computing contexts must not be entirely separated. Depending on both the device characteristics and the user’s location, routing information to a requested point of interested can be displayed as textual description, map, or interactive and Fig. 6: Kompazz: Internet- and WAP-Service multimedia directions. When using Kompazz, the user first enters her personal Whereas Kompazz in its current version already profile and preferences, i.e. the user determines incorporates some of the aforementioned parameters of context • what information to receive awareness, and also include others, like time context for tailor • when to receive it made transmission of messages, e.g. special offers, to users, it • how to do this and is obvious to see that with today’s technology, neither all • from where. parameters of context awareness can be exploited, nor to full Depending on the customer’s profile, she will then e.g. extent. With the proliferation of UMTS networks, this will be receive special offers, product recommendation, and new possible to a much larger extent. 6

VI. CONCLUSION 2000, he became Director Research and Development at Apollis interactive. His research interests include mobile computing and database solutions for In this paper, the mobile shopping guide Kompazz has been mobile applications. examined as an example of how location information can be combined with other types of context information in order to establish context-aware services. Whilst in today’s GSM networks, mobile services predominantly rely on location information, future UMTS services to much greater extent will exploit other context information. The potential of these applications has been shown. Together with improved characteristics of UMTS networks, such as higher bandwidths and more precise user location due to improved cell structures, context awareness offers a large potential for providing added value, tailor made and thus more convenient services to mobile users.

REFERENCES [1] [Wei91] Mark Weiser. The Computer for the 21st Century. Scientific American, 94-104, September 1991. [2] Schilit, B.; Theimer, M.; Welch, B.: Customizing Mobile Application. In: Symposium on Mobile and Location-independent Computing, Cambridge, US, pp. 129-138, 1993 [3] Chen, G.; Kotz, D.: A Survey of Context-Aware Mobile Computing Research. Dartmouth Computer Science Technical Report TR2000-381, November 2000 [4] Schilit, B.; Adams, N.; Want, R.: Context-Aware Computing Applications. In: Proceedings of IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, Santa Cruz, USA, December 1994 [5] Bennet, F.; Richardson, T.; Harter, A.: Teleporting – Making Applications Mobile. In: Proceedings of IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, Santa Cruz, USA, December 1994 [6] Want, R.; Schilit, B.; Adams, N. et al.: An Overview of the PARCTAB Ubiquitious Computing Experiment. In: IEEE Personal Communications, vol.2, no.6, December 1995 [7] Want, R.; Hopper, A.; Falcao, V. et al.: The Active Badge Location System. In: ACM Transactions on Information Systems, vol.10, no.1, January 1992 [8] Long, S.; Kooper, R.; Abowd, G. et al.: Rapid Prototyping of Mobile Context-Aware Applications. In: Proceedings of the Second Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, White Plains, USA, November 1996 [9] Pascoe, J.; Morse, D.; Ryan, N.: Developing Personal Technology for the Field. In: Personal Technologies, vol.2, no.1, March 1998 [10] Dey, A.; Abowd, G.: Towards a Better Understanding of Context and Context-Awareness. Technical Report GIT-GVU-99-22, Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Computing, June 1999

Anthony S. Park received his Dipl.-Inform. (Master of Computer Science) from Aachen University of Technology (RWTH), Germany in 1995, previously studying at the University of Koblenz. From 1989 to 1992 he was with Philips Communication Industry AG in the quality control, and with Parsytec Computer GmbH, focusing on massive parallel computing. In 1995 he became a researcher and Ph.D. candidate at RWTH, department of computer science. In 2000, he was co-founder of C-Com One, the company to introduce the first location based service in the German mobile market. Today, he is CTO of Apollis interactive which evolved from C-Com One. Steffen Lipperts studied Computer Science at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, and at Aachen University of Technology (RWTH), Germany. Having received his Dipl.-Inform. (Master of Computer Science) from the latter in 1997, he was granted a Ph.D. scholarship at the interdisciplinary Postgraduate College 'Computer Science and Technology' at RWTH. He continued to work as a researcher at the department of computer science and joined Apollis interactive in 2001. His research interests include mobile and context-aware applications. Marc Wilhelm received his Dipl.-Inform. (Master of Computer Science) from Aachen University of Technology (RWTH). As co-founder and CTO of Zero One, for nine years he developed tailor made software solutions. In