The Chamber of Engineers has awarded Vodafone’s system engineer, Manuel Magro, for his project entitled Location Detection in UMTS Networks for an Urban Environment. The project was submitted for the Student Project Award competition organised annually by the Chamber of Engineers. Manuel Magro, graduated last year and joined the Core Networks Transmission at Vodafone Malta. His project presented the issues involved in designing a location detection system for modern mobile networks through the application of new intelligent algorithms.

“Mobile network operators are continuously seeking new ways to offer a host of new personalised services. Location-based services are powerful ways to personalise mobile services. These include emergency localisation, location sensitive charging, localised advertising and navigation and tracking services, all of which provide information specific to a location,” said Mr Magro.

The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) gives the opportunity to develop location services using standardised positioning methods for cellular networks. However, to integrate such technologies, significant changes in the network infrastructure or the terminal equipment are necessary.

“The objective of this project was to evaluate an innovative way of providing location detection with minimal change in the already deployed resources through the use of genetic algorithms. Results have shown that the proposed solution can quickly locate the user within the network utilising parameters which are already available in most deployed networks. Furthermore, they demonstrate that the implementation is resilient to fast variations in the radio environment due to effects such as multi-path and fading. Thus the solution provides an inexpensive method to obtain position estimation which can be used for a variety of location based services requiring reasonable accuracy,” concluded Manuel Magro.