The 'Building Block' Approach to Location-Based Services



For any traveler searching for a gas station or restaurant while “armed” only with a mobile phone or PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) with wireless capability, Location-Based Services (LBSs) have proved to be a technological blessing. These are interactive wireless IP services that use geographic information to serve a mobile user via the user’s mobile device, the location of which is broadcast periodically. An LBS can help the user answer such questions as: Where am I? What is nearby? How can I go to…?

LBSs are made possible by combining cellular technology, the Internet and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) utilizing spatial databases. An infrastructure capable of supporting this mélange of systems is generally made up of mobile devices (PDAs, mobile phones, laptops, car navigation unit, etc.), a communication network, a positioning component (Global Positioning System or GPS), a service/application provider and a back-end data/content provider (database).

To create such LBSs would normally take a considerable amount of time. Obviously, building an LBS would benefit highly from a modular approach involving inexpensive, well-tested “building blocks” assembled into whatever network elements are necessary, thus speeding up a service’s time-to-market, giving the service provider a competitive edge and boosting its revenue.

This is precisely the approach suggested by the Dialogic (News - Alert) Corporation in its white paper, “Grow Revenue and Reduce Time to Market with Dialogic Building Blocks; Location Based Services.”Most major network elements consist of backplanes and the circuit boards (and mezzanine or “daughterboards”) that are plugged into them. Dialogic has been at the forefront of such hardware designs since the late 1980s — indeed, the company has been something of a bellwether for the entire telecom hardware component industry — and it now provides an enormous variety of modular building blocks for LBS including compute, packet, and media processing boards; switches; chassis management modules; and accessories.

Such “building block” products for service providers should always be carrier-grade, high-density, NEBS-3/ETSI (News - Alert)-compliant computing solutions, and capable of both high availability and hot swappability (the ability to replace the component while it is running).

Building LBSs based on building blocks such as Dialogic’s becomes a very enticing proposition when time-to-market is of vital importance and a provider’s engineering resources are constrained or nonexistent. Classic service providers and network operators in general will doubtless be forced to simplify their efforts via these “building blocks” so that they can quickly develop and deploy a legion of exiting new, revenue-generating — and customer churn-reducing — IP-based services for business and residential markets.

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Richard Grigonis is an internationally-known technology editor and writer. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert), he was the Editor-in-Chief of VON Magazine from its founding in 2003 to August 2006. He also served as the Chief Technical Editor of CMP Media’s Computer Telephony magazine (later called CommunicationsConvergence from its first year of operation in 1994 until 2003. In addition, he has written five books on computers and telecom (including the Computer Telephony Encyclopedia and Dictionary of IP Communications). To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

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