Gateway Mobile Location Centre (GMLC)

Gateway Mobile Location Centre (GMLC) in short is a fuctinal entity which processes location of a Mobile Station (MS) upon a request from a proxy mobile location centre. It may contain various positioning methods in which it needs to calculate the position withing the requested accuracy level and the freshness.

The positioning methods implemented by the GMLC would be of two types; methods which calculate the position by the GMLC by itself and position calculation with the help of external entities. External entities would be Mobile Switching Centre (MSC), Home Location Register (HLR) or Visitor Location Register (VLR) which keeps the position information about the subscribers.

External entities which requires positioning informatin would access the GMLC by MLP requests with the accuracy level and the freshness. The accuracy level wouuld be defined by a radius and the freshness level will determine the duration in which the information are being captured about a particular mobile station.

Following diagram shows the flow of the informatin in capturing the position information.

GMLC would translate the operator specific Call Detail Record (CDR) information to location information in the primary positioning methods whereas in complex methods GMLC would perfome to the extent where it actually fetch new data from the operator network.

Following listed positioning methods are few among the famous efficient positining methods currently available in calculating the position

ATI

ATI method would access operator's HLR and get required information withing the specified freshness level. If data can not be found withing the required freshness level, GMLC would send a unnotified Short Message (SM) to the user and find the actual required data about the position of the handset.

PSI

In PSI method, GMLC would access the most recent VLR, where user has been doing transactions with the operator network, to find the position data. Informatin about the VLR to be accessed, is found by accessing HLR.

STK

Informatin reciding in the SMSC would be used in STK to find out the MS position information. Even though this method is less accurate than the previous methods, faster than accessing the entire Public Land Mobile Netowrk (PLMN).

CDR

CRR method will use the Call Detail Record (CDR), stored by the operator servers in calculating the position. This method is also efficient compared to the above method but with increased time in fetching data.

Using GMLC many innovative and attractive applications can be built which will eventually increase the operator revenue.