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A study on Location Aware Computing

Presenter : Narendiran Visvanathan

Instructor : Dr. Chin-Chih ChangCourse : CS 898T Mobile and Wireless Networks

Agenda

Location aware computing Location tracking Location tracking technologies Architecture Privacy & Security issues Applications Future work

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What is Location-Aware Computing?The ability to detect the exact location of the

device or may be it's relative location, especially a

wireless device is called location aware computing

system.

Devices that are aware of where they are located

are location aware devices.

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Location tracking

It is not a single technology. Rather, it’s a combination of several technologies merged together to develop system which tracks the location of objects. Some technologies that are used for location tracking are

•Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

•Global Positioning Systems (GPS)

•Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)

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Location tracking technologies GIS

Captures, stores, analyze and report geographic information

Ideal for large scale location tracking GPS

Satellites broadcasts their positions small instrument receives signals of such

satellites and calculates its position Ideal for outdoor positioning such as farming,

surveying, military use or transportation

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Location tracking technologies (2) RFID

A tiny battery-less microchip is attached to commodities and objects that are to be traced

Tags aren’t active all the time Transmit only if it is prompted by a reader Tags can be activated when the reader transmits

radio waves When the tag transmits information, it’s captured

and sent to the central database RFID could be used in exchange of UPC bar

codes

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Architecture

Positioning Platform Privacy

Location Information Proximity awareness

Security handler Map service Service InfoBase

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Positioning platform

It collects data from all types of modules and combines them into a single position to form a virtual device

A software module is implemented in each positioning device within a platform to communicate with the devices

The platform calculates the position and makes it available to the applications

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Privacy

Vital to protect the privacy of users Location information, Proximity awareness are two

issues that comes along with privacy Push service: Users are sent information even if

they don’t request them. Ex: advertisements, informational message

It should be protected so that the actual information is not transmitted to the service provider

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Privacy (2)

Devices automatically transfers data when they are nearer to each other – Proximity problems

Example : PDA It should be restricted and we should be able to

define when we want to do this in what circumstances and when we don’t want to exchange data and on what conditions

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Security

System could be compromised by false positioning sources like Bluetooth beacon with a false position

To avoid, categorize sources in to trusted & non-trusted positioning sources

Trusted: GPS module with user authentication Non-trusted: Mobile devices with Wave LAN that

has no method to authenticate them

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Map service

Map service allows an application to retrieve maps for certain position

Relation between objects and tags are maintained in the Location Information Server (LIS)

Locator forms an interface between the locating mechanism and LIS

LIS locates objects either representing persons or resources inside areas

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Service InfoBase

It finds the published services either by searching the central database or the internet for information that matches the criteria

The application would look into the service InfoBase for services that matches with the request

Example : When an user need to know the nearest public library, museum, or some restaurant or theatres

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Applications

Some applications follows In companies for managing their inventories,

vehicles In hospitals to track wheel chairs, stretchers,

medical equipments and sometimes even patients Automobile industries deployed this technique in

cars In roadside assistance and in traffic advisories Even 911 (emergency number in USA) works

based on this location tracking technique

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Future work

Wider use of GPS would be useful Database advances would improve the ability to

integrate the geospatial data Implementation of more advanced WaveLAN,

Bluetooth and IR positioning technique E911 – To locate a call from mobile phones Cyber guide project : The way the portable

computers assist in exploring physical and cyber spaces

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References

1. Waseem Besada, Towards a Single Locationawareness System,

http://www.isk.kth.se/~waseem/grad-courses/location-awareness.html

2. James Nord, Kare Synnes, Peter Parnes, An Architecture for Location Aware Applications, http://csdl2.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2002/1435/09/14350293.pdf

3. Alexander Leonhardi, Device Location and Location Based Services,

KuVS Summer School “Mobile Computing”, 2002

http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/events/SummerSchool2002/kss-leonhardi.pdf

4. www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/cyberguide

5. http://www.guide.lancs.ac.uk/overview.html

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Questions ?

Thank you very much for your attention!

Contact: nxvisvanathan@wichita.edu