LTE Device-to-device (D2D) Use Cases

Device-to-device is a popular topic. I wrote a post, back in March on LTE-Radar (another name) which has already had 10K+ views. Another post in Jan, last year has had over 13K views. In the LTE World Summit, Thomas Henze from Deutsche Telekom AG presented some use cases of 'proximity services via LTE device broadcast'

While there are some interesting use cases in his presentation (embedded below), I am not sure that they will necessarily achieve success overnight. While it would be great to have a standardised solution for applications that rely on proximity services, the apps have already come up with their own solutions in the meantime.



The dating app Tinder, for example, finds a date near where you are. It relies on GPS and I agree that some people would say that GPS consumes more power but its already available today.



Another example is "Nearby Friends" from Facebook that allows to find your friends if they are nearby, perfect for a day when you have nothing better to do.

With an App, I can be sure that my location is being shared only for one App. With a standardised solution, all my Apps have info about location that I may not necessarily want. There are pros and cons, not sure which will win here.

Anyway, the complete presentation is embedded below:

Enabling proximity services via LTE device broadcast from Zahid Ghadialy

For anyone interested in going a bit more in detail about D2D, please check this excellent article by Dr. Alastair Bryon, titled "Opportunities and threats from LTE Device-to-Device (D2D) communication"

Do let me know what you think about the use cases.

Nice presentation on GPS, Geotagging and its Future

Nice presentation on GPS, Geotagging and its Future

View more presentations from Zahid Ghadialy

Three interesting 'Location Based Services' presentations

Privacy Enhancing Technologies for Mobile Services

View more presentations from Zahid Ghadialy

“Relevant Location” in aLocation Aware Wire-free Connected World

View more presentations from Zahid Ghadialy

Launching the First Location Bank: a new approach to location privacy

View more presentations from Zahid Ghadialy

These were presented in Cambridge Wireless Location Based Systems/Services SIG Event : "Who goes Where? Privacy for Location Based Services" - 23rd March 2011 at CSR, Cambridge

For more information see here.

Location Based Systems/Services Presentations

Interesting presentations from Cambridge Wireless on LBS:

"How do we Make Location a Desirable User Experience?"

Click on the titles below to view the provocateurs' presentations and the notes from the three group discussions -

Introduction from Colin Smithers of Plextek

Group 1: Technology - Presentation by Adrian Swinburne of Quintaxiom + Faciliator's Notes

Group 2: Context - Presentation by Kurt Lyall of Xgenta + Faciliator's Notes

Group 3: Privacy - Facilitator's Notes

Keep your kids safe, get num8 from Lok8u

Launched at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the Num8 (pronounced 'new mate')watch from British company Lok8u (pronounced 'locate you') is said to be the first tracking device specifically designed to help parents keep tabs on wayward offspring.

The £149 Num8 looks much like any ordinary digital wristwatch, but it houses a GPS chip similar to that contained inside a satnav unit. This constantly keeps tabs on the location of the child - it is accurate to within 3 metres - and beams it back to Num8's website for monitoring.

Relatives can receive text messages about the watch's location direct from the device, pinpointing the street address of their youngster at the touch of a button.

"As far as the child is concerned it's a digital watch - for the parent it's a child locating product," said Steve Salmon, Lok8u's chief executive. He added that he hoped it would be used as a way to give children more freedom, rather than restricting them or promoting lazy parenting.

"Only 20% of children are now allowed to go out and play. It's my profound hope that Num8 will help parents feel more comfortable about letting their children go out to play," he said.

It is not the first time that a company has offered parents the chance to track their children by GPS, but most previous devices have been built into mobile phones - expensive pieces of technology that are notoriously easy to dispense with. By contrast, Worcestershire-based Lok8u says it has improved the situation by locking the watch on to the child's wrist.

If an errant child forcibly removes the watch - or has it taken from them - the system immediately trips an alarm, sending an alert to the mobile phone of a parent. Removing the gadget also triggers a warning that is sent by email, just in case the worried parent happens to be sitting in front of a computer.

And to get around the limitations of satellite tracking technology - such as going indoors to prevent the satellite overhead from establishing a direct connection - the system can also use mobile phone signal triangulation to determine a more approximate location for its target.

An Australian children's advocate is very upset with this device. He has already labeled this device as 'alarmist' and 'flippant'. According to him "There won't be a huge market here because I think Australians are smarter than that."

Even though this device is claiming to be the first, there have been other services that can already achieve this. In this article in Guardian, couple of years back, the author successfully tracked his girlfriend using a similar technique via some spying website. The accuracy was not as good though but because of many more cell sites, some of them micro-cell sites and with the use of A-GPS this should be easy.

Anyone aware of similar services out there?

Next Generation GPS Mobile Applications

While attending some seminars, which I cannot give more information about, I heard about exciting NextGen-GPS mobile applications being developed by various companies. GPS is going to make our life very simple (and maybe our brains lazy) .

Imagine the following scenarios:

• You are going from place A to B and someone asks you to drop something where he is (place C) then he can just send you an G-SMS (Its a name defined by me but please feel free to use it) to his GPS mobile. Your phone will ask you if you want this is 'final detination' or 'via destination' or you want to do something else (store, ignore, etc). You can set this as 'via destination' and your original destination remains unaffected.
• You are supposed to visit a particular shop in the city and the area is quite big. Your girlfried goes regularly so you give her the remote-control of your GPS and she can point the area (final destination) where you should be going.
• You are going to watch some match in a particular stadium and around that place there are say 4 car parks. You can select your destination based on 'number of free spaces in a car park' or 'cheapest car park' or 'most secure car park'. You will automatically be routed to the car park based on your criteria. If you have a live update on then this information will be dynamically updated till you reach your final destination. If there are far more parking places then the cars then these car parks can bid for your custom and this will be handles by the GPS transparently.
• You are a member of car sharing organisation. Whenever you need a car, you press a button on your car sharing application and it immediately tells you how far is the nearest car available and gives you an option of different cars which you can select in an area. You select one of the cars and press reserve and then walk to it. I remember hearing of something similar put PC based and that would (I suppose) have lots of limitations as you have to book it in advance and you have to know your location when you require the car, etc. With this GPS based approach you can be anywhere and you can see real-time information.

There are many more interesting things being developed but they are all conceptual at the moment. I am not sure when they will come to the market. I suppose IMS will be one thing that will be required for these kinds of applications. Whenever they are available, they are surely going to make our like far simple.

From a report by MCF Corporation:

As deployment of 3G networks continues to grow, applications built for mobile entertainment should become more ubiquitous. According to Juniper Research, the value of the mobile entertainment market, including music, games, TV, sports and infotainment, gambling and adult content, could increase to nearly $77 billion by 2011 from $17.3 billion in 2006. Included in this forecast is the 50.2% CAGR of the mobile game
market by 2009 (to $10.9 billion from $3.1 billion in 2006). While one could argue the potential size of the mobile entertainment market, we believe that the transition to data has begun in an effort to reduce churn rates, preserve ARPU, and extend carrier brands.


The following highlights a few of the drivers:

Mobile entertainment and content. As deployment of 3G networks continues to grow, applications built for mobile entertainment should become more ubiquitous. According to Juniper Research, the value of the mobile entertainment market, including music, games, TV, sports and infotainment, gambling and adult content, could increase to nearly $77 billion by 2011 from $17.3 billion in 2006. Included in this forecast is the 50.2% CAGR of the mobile game market by 2009 (to $10.9 billion from $3.1 billion in 2006). While one could argue the potential size of the mobile entertainment market, we believe that the transition to data has begun in an effort to reduce churn rates, preserve ARPU, and extend carrier brands.

Location-based services (LBS): LBS is quickly emerging as a benchmark for service differentiation among mobile operators. According to ABI Research, GPS penetration in handsets could reach 1 billion by 2010 while Berg Insight projects 83% LBS growth in Europe, reaching a €5 billion market by 2010. We continue to expect LBS to be utilized for navigation, management/ tracking of assets, information (for example, mobile yellow pages) and emergency services. We are initially focusing on companies that offer machine-to-machine (M2M) applications which allow enterprises and consumers the ability to monitor and manage many types of assets (industrial vehicles, rental car fleets, real estate) in an effort to reduce costs and more efficiently operate.

Converged mobile devices, applications and services: According to IDC, the worldwide market for converged mobile devices increased 42% during 2006, reaching 80.5 million units, and is expected to cumulatively reach more than 1 billion units by 2011. Growth in shipments is primarily due to a greater selection of devices from which to choose and lower price points as mobile carriers look to differentiate their services. Many of these devices offer multiple features such as embedded cameras, MP3 players, GPS capability, and expended memory slots which allow subscribers the ability to carry only one device. We view the introduction of devices such as the iPhone as driving wireless data usage.

At the end of 1Q07, there were 2.8 billion wireless subscribers worldwide,
of which approximately 6%, or 172 million, were 3G subscribers. The 24% CAGR of total subscribers during the past four years has been driven by the rapid deployment of networks, availability and affordability of handsets, along with the introduction of new 3G services. We estimate 3G subscribers will grow at a 55% CAGR through 2010, reaching 652 million (approximately 14%) total estimated subscribers. We believe that wireless technology allows enterprises to become more efficient operators due to the lower costs to deploy and operate, comparable capacity to wireline solutions, increased functionality and productivity, and ability to track personnel and assets.

The chart above illustrates how data ARPU has stabilized total ARPU for AT&T Wireless/Cingular ($48-50 range), which has more than 62 million subscribers. AT&T currently reports approximately 33 million data customers (up more than 30% Y/Y) the growth of which has begun to reflect wider usage of its new 3G UMTS/HSDPA network (current coverage in 165 cities and is on schedule to cover virtually all of the top 100 U.S. markets by the end of 2007). The trend of wireless data
growth offsetting decreases in total ARPU is clearly evident below and is occurring throughout the industry.

Things our phone will do in next 10 years

Interesting article in Cnet on "10 things your mobile will do in next 10 years"

1. Wallet: This would be quite cool when available. Have been hearing about this for years now. Apparently very popular in Japan and S.Korea where people are not using credit cards anymore and instead using Phones.

A much better idea would be to have a universal recognition kind of chip which i can use as Credit card, Smart Card for Trains (In london we have Oyester cards) and then i can use this for accessing company door, garage door , etc. This would be a real killer app but doesnt look like will happen in near (or far) future

2. Internet: In December, ABI Research said that almost 50 million people used social-networking sites on their mobile phones. That number is expected to grow to 174 million by 2011. It would be cool to be able to browse using your phone. Mosst of the sites i use (including mine) are not mobile friendly and this is the thing that is turning people off the net.

3. Location: Already too many phones supporting GPS and A-GPS. The chips are becoming cheaper with cost of around $5 so the manufacturers should have no problem. In future we will get disscounted packages where we will have to receive adverts which would be location specific. Nokia has some applications which can compete with TomTom for getting directions, etc.

4. Search: Hardly anything needs to be mentioned for this.

5. TV: Have written enough on Mobile TV already. IMS Research forecasts that by 2011 there will be more than 30 million mobile TV subscribers in the United States. The firm also predicts that almost 70 million handsets capable of receiving mobile TV will be shipped in the U.S. in 2011.

6. Simplified surfing: From the Cnet article

Ever notice how many clicks it takes to find the one thing you're looking for on your phone? It's worse than counting how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop. But handset makers and mobile operators are
hard at work trying to make phones easier to navigate and simpler to use.

The upcoming iPhone from Apple is a perfect example of how user interfaces will be improved. Apple fans are confident that the company has come up with another slick and intuitive
design, just as it did for the iPod.

One aspect of the iPhone's interface that has been publicized is its use of sensory technology to detect when the device is rotated. This allows the phone to automatically render pictures on the screen in portrait (vertical) or landscape (horizontal) format. That allows the user to determine which format is best for viewing whatever is on the screen, be
it a Web page, video, or photo.

In the future, motion-sensing technology, similar to that used in the Nintendo Wii game console, will also allow people to navigate their cell phone menus or the mobile Internet
with a flick of their wrists.

But motion sensing is just one piece of the puzzle. Operators such as Verizon Wireless are redesigning their content menus
to reduce the number of clicks users must endure to find what they want. Ryan Hughes, vice president of digital media programming for Verizon Wireless, said he believes that user interfaces will be customizable so that users can decide
for themselves which applications will be displayed on their phones most prominently.

Motorola is already offering a customizable interface on the
Razr 2, which the company claims will make searching for contacts, accessing applications, and messaging much easier.

7. Brainier radios: Maybe in future SDRs (Software Defined Radios) may become more common and popular and yes the technology will become feasible. Also multiple radios on the chpset would mean Handovers will be possible from 3G to WiMax, Wifi, etc.

8. Personal Cell: Everyone seems to be talking of Femtocell. Where we will have a small 3G base station in our home. We could use it for Voice or High Speed data. No need for the POTS and use mobile for everything. This will still take some time as the operators dont fully understand the benefits of offering cheap data.

9. Perfect Camera: Today roughly 41 percent of American households own a camera phone. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to buy a phone today that doesn't have a camera. By 2010 more than 1 billion mobile phones in the world will ship with an embedded camera, up from the 589 million camera phones that are expected to be sold in 2007, according to market research firm Gartner.

10. More music on the phone: Mobile phone users around the globe are expected to spend $32.2 billion on music for their handsets by 2010, up from $13.7 billion in 2007, according to Gartner. This can only happen when Music Video/Audio becomes cheaper though. Personally i would prefer listening to FM Radio rather than music but i am not sure how much demand there would be and ofcourse the operators dont gain anything.