Location-based notification as a general-purpose service

An often-discussed mobile commerce application is proximity-based coupon delivery. In a typical scenario a merchant is notified when a valued customer is within some distance of a retail outlet, upon which the customer is delivered a coupon or some notice of a special promotion. We believe that this basic mechanism of location-based notification has application far beyond commercial promotion, and is also of interest for tourism, traffic information, public service, and public safety. Furthermore, we believe that a general-purpose location-based notification service that can serve all these applications would be highly useful. However, as we will show, current architectures deployed by wireless carriers to service location-aware applications cannot handle the load of positioning requests implied by such a general-purpose service. We motivate the need for such a service, discuss the limitations of current architectures for providing location information, and detail the requirements for an architecture which would make such a service possible.