The LOC WG develops specifications to ensure the interoperability of Location Services on an end-to-end basis and provides technical expertise and consultancy on Location Services for other working groups across OMA SpecWorks.

LOC WG has made significant contributions to network operators in the public and private sectors to deliver a variety of reliable location enabled services. As wireless industry advances have made it commercially feasible to locate wireless devices on a mass scale, simultaneously, operators continue to expand their ability to transport data. Examples of additional services include emergency services seeking to locate individuals in emergencies and mobile operators and application vendors wanting to provide location-enabled data and voice services.

To enable emergency and commercial services, several parties must cooperate in controlling and exchanging location data, including mobile operators, network infrastructure manufacturers, mobile terminal manufacturers, application developers, application service providers and geographic information service vendors. Different companies must cooperate to provide an interoperable End-to-End solution to meet increasing consumer demand for seamless roaming. LOC WG provides a standard way to exchange location data, which allows the entire industry to more readily satisfy emergency and commercial needs.

Specific OMA specifications for location services include:

  • Secure User Plane Location (SUPL) is deployed ubiquitously across the industry.
  • Mobile Location Services—Mobile Location Protocol (MLS-MLP) has wide deployment across the industry and provides a standard protocol between the location server and the application server. MLP has been deployed as protocol for emergency call location retrieval in Europe, Canada and Japan.
  • LPPe has gained importance as LTE networks have taken off worldwide. LPPe provides important extensions to the 3GPP positioning protocol LPP and is expected to be used widely with OMA SUPL.

LOC WG is currently focused on extending location services into areas considered difficult to serve (i.e., Indoor Location) and to support the latest technologies such as Wi-Fi positioning, image recognition based positioning, sensors, etc.

Find the LOC and other OMA SpecWorks specifications here.