iGIS
- Submitted by:
- Prabuddha Ghosh
- Company:
- RMSI
- Submitted on:
- 22 Feb, 2010
- Category:
- Organizational Impact Award
- Country:
- India
- Industry:
- IT/Computing/Software
- Products Used:
- MapXtreme 2008 .net SDK, Vertical Mapper, Google Maps API, Oracle Spatial 10g
- Total Votes:
- 29
This image shows how the data on various towers can be viewed in popups by hovering over them
This image shows the point selected by a user alongwith the existing towers falling within the search distance. The search distance is in turn calculated by utilizing business rules which consider a number of things like urban clutter, demographic density, operator's previous towers etc. It also shows other features like display of grd/grc format data, road network visible at higher magnification etc
Business Case
Indus Towers is India’s largest Tower Sharing company with over 100000 towers under management. The business of shared cell tower infrastructure works only when a tower is shared by more than 2 wireless operators. For this it is essential that operators be able to easily find and reserve towers near locations they are interested in.
Application
RMSI created a solution based on MapXtreme 2008 .net SDK where the tower location could be displayed based on query by latlong, query by address, query by Indus tower ID and many other types of queries.When querying the application shows the towers falling within the cutoff ditance from the queried location so the wireless operating company(OPCO) can choose an existing tower to share.
Indus further has complicated and changing business rules that specify when and at what rates and to which operators a particular tower can be shared. A fully flexible rule based framework was created for applying these business rules along with an administration application for creating and storing the business rules in Oracle Database. All rules had a spatial component e.g. if a particular wireless operator already has a tower within x distance of the requested location than the rates charged would differ and so on. MapXtreme’s spatial analysis apis (especially spatialfilter) were used extensively for the implementation of these rules.
Indus also wanted to use the same application for RF planning and calculation of cutoff Distance Bands using clutter and population density data in grd/grc formats. Vertical Mapper alongwith customized tools were used to load the grd/grc data, expose it as webservices, use it for business rules etc
Indus also has a preexisting ERP solution which deals with order fulfillment of the towers selected. Mapxtreme .net sdk being in .net meant we could stick to c# while creating the webservices integration with the existing framework.
Indus further wanted to have the choice of querying on their own data but viewing the data on google maps. We successfully integrated two different views Digital View(based on MapXtreme) and Google View based on Google Maps api so that the user could query the data on Mapxtreme view and switch over to google view to watch the same location in google view .
Indus also wanted to able to various markups and measurements on the map, export data in various formats, have user profile based access to various functionalities, ldap based integration with existing frameworks. All this was achieved by customized c# code with lots of support from the MapXtreme .net SDK.
Benefits
This solution has the following advantages over the traditional Excel report based solutions
- GIS map based interface helps in much better visualization of spatial information (e.g. where there are gaps in the coverage) than traditional excel based reports
- Web Interface allows remote access to the business critical information to Wireless Operatiing Companies(OPCO)’s, planning teams in the field and potential client OPCO’s
- Role Based Functionality control enables the Tower Operating Company(TOC) to expose only those functionalities it wants to each type of user of the system as they want . e.g. External OPCOs do not have the need to know the level of detail on a tower that the internal Site Planning team may have
- Ability to provide a Webservices interface to external systems for integration with existing OSS and BSS installed at the TOCs.