Analysis of Standards on Interoperable Positioning System for Public Safety

In public safety, position information of a rescue requester is very important element since the national public safety agency can provide more efficient rescue services through its accurate position information. The position information is generally provided by mobile operator which operate their own positioning systems. In mobile network services, positioning systems supporting popular positioning methods such as cell based positioning method and A-GNSS are already deployed based on de facto standards defined by 3GPP[1] or OMA[2]. In case of emerging positioning technologies such as Wi-Fi based positioning methods, BT based positioning methods, etc., importance and needs are recently increasing and new emerging positioning technologies are continuously unveiled. However since each service provider implements their own solutions or platforms due to a lack of related standards, an interoperability among positioning systems operated by mobile operators is not assured and the positioning accuracy is different. According to a recent research on the positioning system for public safety in Korea, the test results of a request-response rate are not good because of an interoperability issue. Beside since some mobile virtual network operators do not deploy a positioning system due to a budget problem, the national public safety agency may not acquire position information of a rescue requester who subscribes to mobile virtual network operators. Thus needs on standards of interoperable positioning system for public safety are increasing. In Korea, according to needs mentioned above, standard works to develop an interoperable positioning system for public safety was initiate in 2015, and recently an interfaces standard has been finalized. In this paper, standards defined in Korea will be analyzed, and especially applied methods to deliver various errors to the national public safety agency efficiently and quickly and to make the interoperable positioning system among mobile operators will be proposed. And also this paper will show results of the interoperability test among positioning systems based on the Wi-Fi positioning method.