CORDIS Archive

LBS for accelerating the European-wide deployment of Services for the Mobile User and worker

WORKSHOP

Location: Mykonos, Greece

Dates: 4-5 October, 2002

workshop site

Background

Today the market for 3G services remains largely untested. The very high cost for the licensing and roll out combined with the rather high and optimistic usage rates currently announced - without any 'killer application' in sight - may significantly delay the full deployment and return of investment of UMTS in Europe.

At the same time, very attractive services (both in terms of potential revenue and of innovation) related to the context the end user finds himself in, were confirmed in the last 2 to 3 years. This is the case for example of location based services. A number of those services can be currently deployed even with the present GSM network infrastructure. Considering UMTS for example, it would appear that the very positive appeal of context based value added services by the end users was not fully taken into account during the specification phase and in fact LBS can be considered as a late add-on to quasi final specifications.

As a result, a clear and consistent transition path in terms of technology and services is currently missing. There are then a number of barriers firstly to develop and to deploy value added services and secondly to convince end users to jump to context aware services such as location based services and other data oriented services to be offered through UMTS. In order to limit these risks for future systems and services beyond 3G, the user centric approach should be at the core of the specification phase, placing equal emphasis on the technological and service streams, thus allowing the consideration of a large set of innovative generic context aware services from the outset.

Towards the attainment of this vision for systems beyond 3G, it is essential to demonstrate a successful deployment of 3G technologies in Europe. One has to keep in mind that, if Europe is willing to keep a prominent role at the forefront of wireless technologies and services, it is critical to be able to establish a successful and sustainable 3G roll out. As 3G is not just about voice communications but aims towards total seamless connectivity on the move, it is vital to enable services to roam freely between networks at least as effectively as voice has been with the present networks. Furthermore more technical work is needed for the inter-operation of value added services in a 3-mode context (GSM, GPRS, UMTS). In the first instance, location based services are a valuable target to focus upon because they add a powerful dimension to communication devices and could stimulate the end-user demand for further context aware services, services beyond the MMS and e-m currently foreseen. This initial focus on location based service could then facilitate the identification of transition paths for the services and the wireless technologies from GSM to beyond 3G.

Workshop Objective

Based on the discussion taking place within the 5th FP IST LOBSTER cluster (LOBSTER), the objectives of this 2 day Wordkshop are mainly three-fold:

• To review current possibilities offered by as solution enabler for complex societal problems, such as resource allocation, management and optimization in areas such as Information management, Sensor Fusion, Transportation, Health, Education and e-Work
• To Identify opportunities for large scale optimization problems whose solution requires the use of LBS.
• To confirm interest for proposing IPs or NoE in 6th FP building on LBS towards more advanced context sensitive wireless services incorporating additional sensors (temperature, gesture; olfactory, etc.) also placing the emphasis on middleware and platform issues.

Proceedings: Full papers for the call and Power Point presentations are due 1 week before the workshop. Distribution will be done in paper and CD. Proceedings will be open to the public and dissemination will be done in electronic format on the WIN and LOBSTER web pages.