Location-based Services Fundamentals and Operation

Chapter 10. Interorganizational LBS Operation

Generally, there are many actors involved in the operation of an LBS. In the following text, an actor denotes an individual, organization, department, or enterprise that offers services to other actors, or consumes services from other actors, or does both of them. From a system's point, each actor autonomously operates and controls its own administrative technical domain, given, for example, by a network infrastructure, a server farm, or only a single mobile device. It is common practice in the telecommunications or Internet sector to classify the different actors participating in the operation of a service according to their roles, where a role represents a certain field of activity of an actor associated with a set of functions for realizing and controlling portions of a service as well as making it accessible to the end user. For this purpose, the roles have to interact with each other. A reference point covers the interaction between a pair of roles and is basically an abstract term representing communication links, interfaces, protocols, and transactions that are needed to exchange any kind of user and control data a service or portions of a service are based on. The classical roles in mobile communications are the roles of subscriber, network operator, application service provider, and content provider. A single actor may adopt several of these roles, for example, the roles of network operator and application service provider often ...