Notes

GSM Concepts

Daniel Weibel
Created 10 Feb 2015

A list of GSM concepts related to the localisation of mobile phones.

Note that this applies specifically to GSM. For UMTS and LTE most concepts are similar, but the terminology is often different.

Contents

Acronyms

   
GSM Global System for Mobile Communication (2G)
UMTS Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (3G)
LTE Long Term Evolution (4G)
MS Mobile Station
BTS Base Transceiver Station (called Node B in UMTS and eNodeB in LTE)
MCC Mobile Country Code
MNC Mobile Network Code
LAC Location Area Code
LAI Location Area Identifier
CID Cell ID
GCID Global Cell ID

MCC

Mobile Country Code

Country identifier.

Examples

  • 228: Switzerland
  • 208: France

References

MNC

Mobile Network Code

Identifier of an operator inside a country.

Examples

In Switzerland:

  • 01: Swisscom
  • 02: Sunrise
  • 03: Orange

In France:

  • 01: Orange
  • 02: Orange
  • 10: SFR
  • 13: SFR
  • 15: Free Mobile
  • 20: Bouygues Telecom
  • 88: Bouygues Telecom

References

LAC

Location Area Code

Identifier of a Location Area (LA) inside an operator’s network inside a country. A location area consists of a number of Base Transceiver Stations (BTS). The LAC is a 16-bit number, thus there are 65536 possible location areas per operator per country.

The geographical sizes of different location areas, as well as the number of BTS they contain, may be very different, based on user density, etc.

References

LAI

Location Area Identifier

MCC + MNC + LAC

Globally unique identifier of a location area. Broadcast regularly by the BTS of a location area.

References

CID

Cell ID

Identifier of a BTS within a location area. In the case of directional antennas, the CID may identify one of the two or three sectors of the antenna (see references for details). The CID is a 16-bit number (GSM) or 28-bit number (UMTS).

References

GCID

Global Cell ID

MCC + MNC + LAC + CID

Globally unique identifier of a BTS.

References

Public Cell ID Location Databases

There is a number of services for getting the geographical location of a BTS given its GCID:

  • OpenCellID
    • Around 80’000 cells in Switzerland
    • RESTful HTTP API, but access is restricted, if one does not also contribute to the DB
    • However, entire DB can be downloaded freely as a CSV file
  • Mozilla Location Service
    • Contains apparently a subset of the OpenCellID data
  • The unofficial Google API at http://google.com/glm/mmap
  • Google Maps Geolocation API
    • Restricted number of queries to the HTTP API for free, otherwise paid license necessary
  • Furthers are listed here

Location Update Procedure

Procedure in which a mobile station (MS) informs the network about its current location area, i.e. communicates its current LAC to the network. There are the following reasons for a location update:

  • Periodical location update (at a fixed time interval)
  • When a MS changes from one location area to another (MS has to detect this change, based on LAI broadcast by BTS)
  • When a MS is switched on

The current LAC of a MS is stored in the Home Location Register (HLR) and Visitor Location Register (VLR) of the network.

References

Paging

Localisation of a MS for a Mobile Terminated Call (MTC), that is, the delivery of a call or SMS to a MS. The network permanently knows in which location area a specific MS is, but not which BTS it is connected to. To deliver a call or SMS, the network broadcasts a request over all BTS of the corresponding location area. This is called paging. If the MS answers, the network knows the active BTS (the MS’s CID), and can establish a connection.

References

Localisation of Mobile Stations

There are different scenarios for localising a MS:

  • Network operator wants to localise a MS
  • MS wants to localise itself
  • A third party having some information about a MS wants to localise it

The simplest way, which works for all three scenarios, is to take the current CID of the MS and find out the location of the corresponding BTS (see Public Cell ID Location Databases above). In order for the network operator to know the current CID, the MS has to respond to a paging request (in UMTS this can be done easily with data traffic, so that the user of the MS doesn’t notice anything). The MS itself knows its CID at any time.

There are many more sophisticated methods (network-based and MS-based), see references.

References

GSM Architecture

GSM Architecture Source: Jochen Schiller. Mobile Communications. Second Edition. Addison-Wesley, 2003 (p. 101)