Next Generation Mobile Services using Location specific applications Amitabha Samajpati, Pramita Mitra, Tanmoy Sarkar, Pradip K. Das {amitabha_samajpati, pramitamitra83, tanmoysarkar}@rediffmail.com, pkdas@ieee.org Department Of Computer Science and Engineering Jadavpur University, Kolkata – 700032. Abstract The rapid growth of personal mobile communication devices has generated the need for more and more wireless applications. In this respect, the knowledge of mobile user's location can add to the fields of services and applications that can be offered to the mobile user. Such enhanced services are termed as ‘Location Based Services’ (LBS). It is a rapidly growing technology in the sector of mobile communication and services and offers a large application domain. This paper delves into the possible advantages of using mobile phones with built-in GPS support for Location Based Services over the approach using CELL-ID or Cell of Origin (COO) method and also prescribes a general architectural idea along with an example application for implementing LBS using Global Positioning System (GPS) enabled mobile devices on client side. Keywords: Location Based Services, J2ME, Generic Connection Framework, Global Positioning System, JSR 179 Location API. 1. Introduction Technological advances, especially those in wireless communication and mobile devices, have resulted in massive demand for providing value-added data services to the consumers. This also enables the mobile service providers to increase the average revenue per user and attract more consumers towards such data services. Location Based Services (LBS) have emerged as the key part of this portfolio. There are two basic approaches to implementing location-based services: A. Process location data in a server and deliver results to the device. B. Obtain location data for a device-based application that uses it directly [1]. Previous applications in the field of LBS have mostly used the first approach, which includes the process of tracking the consumer by locating his mobile phone. This tracking procedure is based on locating the device in a particular cell sector surrounding the cell tower under the coverage of which the phone is currently roaming, and continuing this procedure recursively by subdividing the sector into smaller sub- sectors until a near exact location is obtained [2]. But this procedure has the limitations that the location information may be inaccurate as it fails to pinpoint the exact location of the consumer. This limitation can be of sheer inconvenience in the scenario of a congested metropolis, where the exact location of the consumer is vital for providing the service. Our application circumvents this limitation by incorporating Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers on the mobile devices of the client i.e. using mobile phones with built-in GPS support. Moreover, mobile clients must be designed to balance the utilization between the resources like computing environment in limited CPU, memory, network bandwidth, battery resources and the loads between the client and the server. Making more computations on client side reduces bandwidth consumption but increases CPU load and memory consumption [3]. In our application, we have transferred the entire data processing activity to the server side leaving only the responsibility of location information acquisition to the client side. We aim at developing such an application incorporating LBS to provide a service to search a taxi for a given passenger request, containing information about client’s destination, from a collection of taxies maintained by the system. 2. Objective In this paper, we describe the development of an application package to be incorporated in Java enabled mobile phones. Our objective is to build an example system that aims to find a taxi for a specific passenger request. We have logically subdivided our approach in two broad parts. The first part describes the implementation of the objective using a non-location- aware manner, where the consumer has to explicitly specify the position from where he is consuming the service. This is based on the notion of Short Message Service (SMS). We deploy this implementation as an