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Infrastructure-Assisted Geofencing: Proactive Location-Based Services with Thin Mobile Clients and Smart Servers | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

Infrastructure-Assisted Geofencing: Proactive Location-Based Services with Thin Mobile Clients and Smart Servers


Abstract:

With the increasing popularity of smart phones, location-based services became a hot topic and a great number of solutions were presented over the last years. The majorit...Show More

Abstract:

With the increasing popularity of smart phones, location-based services became a hot topic and a great number of solutions were presented over the last years. The majority of applications are based on the idea to present location-specific information in case the smartphone user asks for it. A relatively small amount of applications are dealing with geo-notifications that are intended to inform the smartphone user proactively about location-specific information in case a dedicated zone is entered or left. The technology behind proactive location-based services is called Geofencing and it is mainly implemented and executed at the mobile device. This paper presents a new approach to offload this resource intensive process of monitoring the user's location into the infrastructure. The mobile device is thereby considered to be a thin client that is mainly responsible to locate itself whereas the continuous comparison of the mobile's position with a large set of dedicated zones, called geophones, is executed within an environment with lower resource constraints. A prototypical implementation of a thin client as well as the corresponding location processing unit within the infrastructure gets introduced, discussed and evaluated under different environmental conditions.
Date of Conference: 30 March 2015 - 03 April 2015
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 25 June 2015
Electronic ISBN:978-1-4799-8977-5
Conference Location: San Francisco, CA, USA

I. Introduction

Today, location-based services (LBS) are an indispensable feature of mobile devices like smartphones or tablets. While taking the user's location into account, they are mainly used to enable the search for location-based information (e.g. surrounding shops, nearby friends, available rental cars). Thereby, a LBS is being queried and the relevant information is being presented by a mobile application only on request by the user. In other words, the requested location-specific information is being pulled by rather than being pushed to the user [1]. Recently, all major mobile operating systems introduced build-in support for proactive LBS, better known as Geofencing, In this case, the mobile device is able to notify the user about location-specific information in case the user enters or leaves a dedicated zone, called geofence. This feature is mainly used by location-based reminder applications as a convenient way for users to be reminded about personal to-do's at particular locations [2]. Another very promising application area deals with location-based advertisements [3]–[6]. Mobile device users that are walking or driving close to a commercial district are considered to be potential customers and will be proactively notified about sales or coupons.

References

References is not available for this document.