The desire to Track Cell Phones Location, or what’s also known as Trace mobile is known for everything from public safety, kid protection, elder care, employee monitoring and even relationship monitoring.  Today, GPS enabled mobiles are basic tools, but GPS signals are definitely not always obtainable.  When satellite signals are not readily available, or accuracy is less important than battery life, making use of Cell-ID is a good substitute to GPS mobile phone tracking.  The position of the cell phone may be approximated by the cell network cell id, that determines the cell tower the smartphone is using.   By understanding the location of the tower, then you can know approximately the spot where the handset  is.  Nonetheless, a tower can cover an enormous area, from a few hundred meters, in high density regions, to several miles in lower density zones. This is why location CellID accuracy is lower than GPS accuracy. Having said that tracking via CellID still supplies a very useful substitute.

Another method of Cell Phone Location Tracking is Triangulation or Mobile Location Services (MLS).  Cell Tower Triangulation makes use of signal analysis data to compute the time it takes signals traveling from the cellular phone to a minimum of three cell towers to estimate location.

To conform to Federal Communications Commission rules, cell phone companies have to be in a position to supply authorities with smartphone latitude and longitude to an precision of 50 to 300 meters.   Cell Tower Triangulation isn’t going to always meet this requirement.  By way of comparison, commercially available GPS systems can achieve accuracy down to less than 10 meters.  This relies on numerous factors, as GPS signals are often quite weak and are influenced  by numerous factors.   With Mobile Location Services (MLS), the GSM cell network provider utilizes triangulation techniques to estimate the location of the smartphone, its accuracy is proven to be less than than that of GPS.  MLS is also impacted by factors similar to  GPS in the sense of the interference affecting signal strength and the density of GSM towers to help in the triangulation calculation.   In remote areas location accuracy may be off as much as a mile.

Generally speaking it is a matter of what location tracking system is available, and the need for accuracy.  Hybrid methods are emerging that use various techniques in tandem to provide best available location given available resources.  It may be critical to consider how GPS location software programs handle the data and controls cell phone settings including options of  getting realtime tracking when needed, or preferring to reduce battery use and data transmission.  Typically the software decides the position with a GPS receiver and sends the tracking data to a server through a cellular packet data connection. The data connection to the server is usually made using the internet.  The frequency of GPS sampling and how frequently and by just what technique the information is sent to the server affect effectiveness and oftentimes costs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tags

GPS Devices