Peer-review paper, geolocation positioning with wireless cellular network in Hong Kong

Location Based Services (LBS) is increasingly popular worldwide as its applications cover a wide spectrum of wireless users such as manpower and fleet management, travel aids and location identification in case of emergency. Current geolocation methods for LBS may be classified as GPS-based, cellular network based, or their combinations [Soliman S., et al. (2000); Tang W., et al. (2003)]. With the GPS alone method, successful position determination relies very much on sufficient number of visible satellites. However, with cellular network or the combination of GPS and cellular network approach, real-time location of a mobile device can be determined even in very dense high-rise urban environments. Although cellular network based positioning has many potential applications in Hong Kong, in this city, it is still at the premature stage. One of the concerns is its accuracy achievement, as different applications may require different accuracy specifications. This paper discusses an investigation on the accuracy of cellular network based positioning in Hong Kong. It is found that the current LBS with this technique can generally provide better than 200m accuracy in urban area, and the positioning error can be as big as 1km in rural area.