Title: TECHNICAL ASPECTS AND POSITIONING METHODS

Technical Aspects and Positioning Methods

A common LBS architecture consists of three parties: The Mobile Operator, the LBS Provider and the Mobile User (cf. ). Usually, the Mobile Operator works as intermediary between the actual provider of the service and the user. This includes the identification of the customer for payment purposes, the transmission of user’s location to the LBS Provider and the transmission of the service itself via mobile communication networks. The LBS Provider combines user’s location with relevant geo information in the process of creating and delivering the requested service. Thereby, the action-specific user context can be derived. This deliverable will focus on the presented classical architecture. However, further architectures exist as e.g. the architecture of usage scenario 3 – tracking in the working context (chapter 2.4.3).

Figure : Example for a location based service (LBS) infrastructure and the involved parties.

The availability of user’s current location information is the precondition for the existence of LBS. The degree of precision that is obtained by the different positioning methods directly affects user’s idem identity as it is a more or less concrete observable attribute of his identity (cf. Chapter for details). The way how user’s identity is determined affects the level of control he has about his idem identity. Thereby a smaller level of control about this attribute of his identity can also affect his idem identity.

In the following sections, we make a distinction between network-external sources of location and network-internal sources of location. A user can be located and tracked by using network-internal positioning methods (e.g. by cell of origin positioning). This can take place even without them noticing. In contrast, they have a certain amount of control with network-external positioning technologies.