Location Based Services are becoming an integral part of the wider telecommunication scenario. However, the approaches to provide Location Based Services and the research issues in this area are diverse and broad. In this paper, the present state of the Location Based Service systems has been analyzed. The analysis confirmed the heterogeneity of the research problems associated with Location Based Services as well as the array of solutions to address these problems. On one hand, the study carried out will enable one to get some idea about essential features for the implementation of a Location Based Service system. On the other hand, it is strongly believed that this study will assist researchers and the industry to get a sense of the multidimensional research space of Location Based Services which will be helpful for later exploration of this field

Mobile users are becoming increasingly dependent on location related information. Delivery of accurate and timely location related information depends on estimation of the mobile user's position. Due to the limitation of coverage associated with common positioning systems for mobiles, integration of different types of positioning systems is necessary. Such an integrated solution can only work if it ensures smooth, unobtrusive handover among the positioning systems involved. In this paper, we propose novel algorithms to realize the goal of smooth handover among positioning systems. Our proposed algorithms not only ensure seamless handover among positioning systems, but also makes context awareness, information gathering and user preferences part of the positioning solution.

This work proposes context aware handover algorithms for mobile positioning systems. The algorithms perform handover among positioning systems based on important contextual factors related to position determination with efficient use of battery. The proposed solution is implemented in the form of an Android application named Locate@nav6. The performance of the proposed solution was tested in selected experimental areas. The handover performance was compared with other existing location applications. The proposed solution performed correct handover among positioning systems in 95 percent of cases studied while two other applications performed correct handover in only 50 percent of cases studied. Battery usage of the proposed solution is less than one third of the battery usage of two other applications. The analysis of the positioning error of the applications demonstrated that, the proposed solution is able to reduce positioning error indirectly by handing over the task of positioning to an appropriate positioning system. This kept the average error of positioning below 42.1 meters for Locate@nav6 while the average error for two other applications namely Google Latitude and Malaysia maps was between 92.7 and 171.13 meters.Keywords handover among mobile positioning systems, power efficient mobile positioning, switching between indoor and outdoor positioning systemsComputer Science • 15 (2) 2014 http://dx