Design and Implementation of Location Awareness and Sharing System using GPS and 3G/GPRS

In this age of significant telecommunications competition, mobile network operators continuously seek new and innovative ways to create differentiation and increase profits. One of the best ways to accomplish this is through the delivery of highly personalized services. One of the most powerful ways to personalize mobile services is based on location. Location is a key to provide location based services (LBS) to the user because the location information is typically useful for coverage, deployment, routing, location service, target tracking and rescue operations. One of the most obvious technologies behind LBS is positioning, with the most widely recognized system being the Global Positioning System (GPS). There are no subscription fees or setup charges to use GPS. This document provides detail on the design and implementation of a java application which provides the users current location sends this location using SMS (Short Message Service) plus sharing location with friends and family and views them on maps. Users can also take benefit of this application in emergency situations by using emergency feature of this application. To get the location coordinates, application is using GPS (Global Positioning System) as location provider. The application design has five parts: a mobile client, a web server, a database, GPS system and a map service. A mobile client application which consists of a mobile and GPS receiver finds the location of the user to get aware of his location. In order to share this location the mobile client sends this location to the web server from where other users can get this location if they have the authentication provided by the user. The mobile client is implemented using J2ME which is one of the most promising software platforms for mobile devices. Sun representatives assert that 18 to 20 million mobile phones support the J2ME platform. Analysts predict that within the next few years, this technology will become omnipresent. The web server side programming is done using PHP and database is maintained by MYSQL.