Today, mass-market consumer GNSS is focused on in-vehicle navigation systems, personal navigation devices (PND) and cellular phones with or without Assisted-GPS. GPS in mobile phones is becoming a differentiator in its own right. Recent forecasts predict that cellular phone navigation applications will soon overtake PND shipments. GNSS capability will, in the future, be a pre-requisite for all mobile phones just as cameras have become a pre-requisite for most mobile phones today.
Current times show themselves to be a key turning point in the GNSS story. The technology has become affordable, less power hungry and more highly integrated. As system integrity improves and services become more ubiquitous, many new and innovative applications will emerge to stimulate growth in the market. The next few years will represent the time that GNSS grew up, became very widely known and taken for granted by the masses.
However, GNSS is not always the answer, particularly in indoor environments or in the dense ‘Urban Canyon’ where satellite-based signals are critically compromised by obscuration and environmental degradation. In these situations, other technologies already in the consumer device are being utilised to bridge the gap, such as Cell-ID and particularly Wi-Fi. Positioning techniques based around the pattern of observations associated with multiple Wi-Fi ‘hotspots’ include ‘fingerprinting’ where observations are compared to previously mapped locations, and “trilateration”, where received power is used as an indication of distance from the transmitter and a geometric calculation against known transmitter locations is used to locate the device.
