Intelligent switching method using Cell-ID/GPS positioning on mobile application

At present, a large number of current generation mobile phones have GPS (Global Positioning System) built-in. While the GPS satellites are continuously transmitting a radio message containing information, the GPS receiver fitted in mobile phone receives that information and calculates its current position, speed and heading. The three main key functions for applying GPS are information function, security function and telemetric function. People gain many benefits from having access to mobile phone GPS location such as: tracking elderly people or patients who require intensive care in emergency situations, finding the location of other people, sending SMS to the customer about product promotions when they come nearby the shops and etc. However, GPSs still have limitation on signal transmission in some areas, such as inside the building (Chen & Kotx, 2000), urban or canyons where the satellite links are blocked or the signal is unrealizable. An alternative way to solve the lacking signal problem is by using the existing data from the network to identify which cell site and sector a user is in. Cell-ID based positioning technologies work completely independently from GPS which is not only fast but also support indoor and 3D positioning. In this paper, we present a switching method for signal transmission that mixes between cell-ID and GPS on mobile phone in determining the current position of the mobile phone.