Jonathan Wierenga
ABSTRACT
The SIMPLE (Simple Indoor Multi-level Portable Location Engine) wireless location prototype runs on an IPAQ PDA equipped with an 802.11b wireless LAN interface and provides a handheld location system in conjunction with a number of access points. The system has been particularly developed to work within a museum or heritage scenario that spans multiple locations and may enable metropolitan wide location services. SIMPLE enables a wireless enabled PDA or in the future a cellular phone with WLAN functionality to download a wireless database and map and determine their location based on received signal strength indicator (RSSI) information. A number of techniques have been combined within SIMPLE to enable the PDA to function as an autonomous device with minimal interaction to the service provider infrastructure. This should enable more scalable middleware solutions to be created, where users only interact when requesting delivery of information.
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Index Terms
- SIMPLE: developing a LBS positioning solution
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Reviews
Jesus Villadangos
Location-based services (LBS) motivate this paper's proposal of a user positioning system. The paper starts with the set of relevant issues for LBS provisioning: usability, realistic user scenarios, technical constraints, and business models. LBS middleware is then clarified, with a short and updated review of existing proposals. The rest of the paper is devoted to presenting a user positioning system. The user positioning system presented in this paper, simple indoor multilevel portable location engine (SIMPLE), enables wireless devices working autonomously to position users in indoor scenarios by downloading a wireless database and map and determining their location via received signal strength indicator (RSSI) information. The system is a response to the empirical model, where position is a function of previous measurements at marked points in the real scenario. Such models allow developers to integrate multipath interference easily, but they require more calibration. In addition, the use of SIMPLE minimizes infrastructure modifications. The system works in two phases. The first phase is offline. First, it is necessary to measure the signal strength at some relevant points of the scenario. Then, a smoothing and trailing function is applied to group the measurements, and to form clusters that will be used in the second phase to locate the user. In the second phase, the user is located using live measurements. In this phase, the most likely stored marking position is calculated in relation to the input observation, using Bayes' theorem. The authors show that the system provides very accurate user positioning, with an average error of about 4.5 meters. In order to improve the precision of the system, and to interpolate the user's position, the authors propose some alternatives for the online phase, such as time averaging. This is a very interesting paper; it is the result of an intelligent integration of different ideas from proposals presented in the literature. I agree with the authors' proposal to integrate the system with tracking components to improve user positioning. However, I think that user positioning should be reconsidered, and should not only be oriented toward locating the user with millimeter precision. As the authors establish, LBS systems, hence user positioning systems, should be proposed that take into account real scenarios. An error of three or four meters could signify, for example, the user being in a different room inside of a museum. User positioning in some scenarios should be related with relevant zones in the scenario, and not with the concrete coordinates of the user. This line of research could be used to extend the results presented in this interesting paper. Online Computing Reviews Service
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