An Innovative Gateway for Indoor Positioning

  • PDF / 542,959 Bytes
  • 10 Pages / 600.03 x 792 pts Page_size
  • 108 Downloads / 298 Views

DOWNLOAD

REPORT


An Innovative Gateway for Indoor Positioning Giannis F. Marias, Giorgos Papazafeiropoulos, Nikos Priggouris, Stathes Hadjiefthymiades, and Lazaros Merakos Department of Informatics & Telecommunications, University of Athens, Panepistimiopolis, Athens 15784, Greece Received 1 June 2005; Revised 4 January 2006; Accepted 13 January 2006 Enabling the pervasive paradigm requires the incorporation of location information. Retrieving location data has been a field of ongoing research for both the outdoor and indoor wireless systems. The results in the cellular scenario are already mature and location architectures have been standardized. Recent research is ongoing for indoor-positioning mechanisms, resulting in implementations that vary. A platform that enables the deployment of location-based services in heterogeneous indoor and WLANbased communication systems will address difficulties in cooperating with different positioning systems. For that purpose, we have designed a novel entity, called Gateway WLAN Location Center (GWLC), which hides the heterogeneous functions of the indoor positioning architectures, incorporating a unified framework for retrieving location data of users and objects. The GWLC platform has been designed to meet objectives such as modularity, scalability, as well as portability, and to facilitate open interfaces. In this contribution, we elaborate on the design principles and the functionality of GWLC. We also provide performance results, obtained through real experiments. Copyright © 2006 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

1.

INTRODUCTION

During the last years, cellular operators, service and content providers have been trying to identify the needs of a fully connected user, facilitating pervasive communications and ubiquitous computing concepts. The most promising direction seems to be the development of context-aware applications. These applications are based on the contextual information of a mobile or nomadic user and they can lead to highly customized personal communications. The location of a user is the most important attribute of the contextual information. Thus it is expected that services provided to the users, which are based on his/her location, will exhibit high market penetration, worldwide. Examples of location-based services (LBS) are (i) emergency services as defined by the E911 and the E112 recommendations in North America and EC countries, respectively [1, 2]; (ii) point of interest (POIs), such as finding location and proximity services; (iii) navigation and routing; (iv) geocoding and reverse geocoding. In order to support such applications, cellular operators and organizations offering wireless access have to use

location-tracking mechanisms and deploy specialized platforms, which will execute the logic to provide LBS services. Until now, these platforms were highly customized for peculiar and specific applications, and, as a result, the deployment of LBS has been evolving at a slow pace. In order to accelerate the LBS deployment, the network operators incorpo