Polaris Wireless announced new performance benchmarks for its software-based Location Signatures (Polaris WLS) Hybrid technology in terms of accuracy, time to fix and battery consumption for indoor and dense urban environments. Polaris Wireless also announced that its solution is 4G LTE ready, in addition to offering support for existing cellular air interfaces (GSM, cdma2000, UMTS).
The performance benchmarks were established for through field trials conducted by major wireless carriers globally. Specifically, North American carriers have recently conducted 3G location system trials, testing indoor and outdoor wireless location performance over an urban trial area of 10 square kilometers. Polaris out performed other solutions with a consistent accuracy of 47 to 59 meters versus 230 to 250 meters at 67th percentile. As further confirmation, a major wireless service provider in Asia recently tested 3G location performance, including accuracy, time to fix and battery consumption in urban and suburban settings. Results demonstrated Polaris Hybrid solution performance of 50 to 60 meters in 5 seconds time to fix compared with alternatives at 130 to 140 meters with 20 to 30 seconds time to fix. In addition, significant improvements in battery consumption were demonstrated to support pervasive location applications requiring frequent fixes, such as zone-based mobile marketing services.
Polaris said these trials demonstrated that its Hybrid solution performs better than A-GPS alone in both indoor and complex environments, such as dense urban areas with high rise buildings and many signal obstructions.
“The ability to locate wireless handsets and devices in indoor environments is particularly important since that is where most users originate voice and data calls,” said Professor Per K. Enge, a leading researcher at Stanford University’s GPS Laboratory. “Location performance in places like high rise office buildings and indoor shopping malls is critical to meeting consumer and enterprise demand as well as emergency call requirements. Further, with the established trend of mobile wireless replacing landline services, the importance of accurate, timely and efficient location indoors will continue to rapidly grow.”
“The advantage of the Polaris Wireless solution is that it works well in non line-of-sight, cluttered environments — with indoors being a particularly challenging environment for cellular location systems,” said Dr. Marty Feuerstein, CTO of Polaris Wireless. “WLS capitalizes on complex obstructions and shadowing to improve location performance. In addition, the Polaris Wireless Hybrid location solution for 4G LTE networks enables truly global and ubiquitous location-aware applications that offer consumers far more than today’s turn-by-turn navigation.”
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