A Business Model for Personalized Promotion Systems on Using WLAN Localization and NFC Techniques

Although wireless local area networks (WLAN) have been shown to be an effective technique for localization of moving objects, their potential for business applications still have a lot of rooms for exploration. In this paper, we propose a novel business model for sales promotion in retail chain stores with the use of WLAN localization and near field communication (NFC) technologies. The objectives of the business model are to increase the flow volume of customers into the retail chain stores and their incentives in purchasing selected items in the stores. In the proposed business model, the NFC technology is used as the first mean to motivate customers to come to the stores. Then, with the use of WLAN, the movement behavior of the customers, who are carrying smart phones, within the stores is captured and maintained in a movement database. By exploring the movement behavior of a customer, personalized promotion and marketing strategies can then be applied to increase the incentive of the customer for purchasing his interested items when he enters the stores again. In addition, we also propose an enhanced R-tree for indexing the data items maintained in the movement database and to support various types of spatial management and marketing queries to maximize the utilization of space in a store for displaying the sales items.

I Introduction

With the advances in electronic and wireless communication technologies, the design and development of various novel mobile and pervasive computing applications have attracted great interests both in the industry and academic. Nowadays, people can use their smart phones easily as mini-computers to play computer games and retrieve various useful information, e.g., mapping and shopping information, through cellular or wireless networks. It can be anticipated that pervasive computing applications will become one of the cores computing applications in the coming future and more and more electronic devices will be equipped with powerful computing capability to support various novel and advanced services to mobile users.