E-911 mobile location and location-based technologies

Developing mobile station (MS) location technologies that meet the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) wireless E-911 requirement for emergency location has become an increasingly important topic. The FCC has currently ruled that the carriers begin selling and activating ALI (Automatic Location Identification)-capable handsets no later than October 1, 2001 and has also granted a limited waiver of the accuracy standards to certain carriers. Since location information can potentially be used for other location-dependent applications, there is also an explosive interest in the development of new location-based commercial services. In this paper, we present a summary of the location technologies that could potentially be used as solutions to comply with the E-911 ruling. We also discuss the emergence of location commercial services and explore how mobile location information can be used to (1) improve performance in different layers of the systems, and (2) increase wireless system functionality for location commercial services.