Mobile Intelligence

10.1 INTRODUCTION

Besides time, location is one of the major quantities determining our everyday life. People make use of it when navigating through cities or on highways, for making appointments, for ordering goods or services, or simply for informing other people about their whereabouts. Thus, the concept of location is essential for orientation in the real world. On the other hand, the emergence of the Internet has shown us how to overcome this concept. At least with regard to communication and information exchange between people, it does not play a role where these people are located in the world or by what distances they are separated from each other. The Internet shadows the location of its participants, and that is why it is often also referred to as global village or cyberspace.

Mobility means change of location (at least in the context considered here). Cellular networks like GSM owe their success to people who want to communicate while being on the move, and provide several mechanisms for supporting mobility, for example, location management for routing incoming telephone calls to the base station the subscriber is connected to. Initially planned for telephony only, cellular networks have been extended with data services like GPRS or UMTS packed-switched in the recent years and are now increasingly used for Internet access. Many services of the global village or modified versions of it, for example, push Email or browsing via WAP, can now be accessed from mobile devices, ...