Location
Service for Mobile MultiMedia Environments
Mobile computers and communication devices are establishing themselves as ubiquitous features of daily life. This development is linked to tremendous growth in the number and sophistication of mobile and mobile-aware software applications. Increasingly, such applications need access to information about their own and other objects' physical locations, a requirement known as location-awareness.
Existing location-aware applications and systems are typically tailored to a particular type of positioning technology. This is unsatisfactory considering that no technology provides ubiquitous coverage. Equally, there are few accepted models and abstractions for building location-aware applications, making their design and implementation costly and error-prone.
Location-awareness raises legitimate concerns about personal and organizational privacy. These vary widely across administrative and application domains. Hence, there is a need for a model that balances protection and functionality as appropriate for a particular target environment.
The functionality and structure of a location-aware system fundamentally depends on the location model employed. In this project, we developed a formally specified location model that facilitates design and implementation of such systems. Location-awareness generally cannot be achieved autonomously but requires support by a location service, tracking physical location of objects, and optionally providing location prediction, access control and other functions. Inevitably, location service and location model are closely intertwined.
The project developed a model for location information, the overall architecture and components of a location service to support that model, and an architecture-independent protection model. The main results of the project were:
·
A hierarchical, semi-symbolic location model
that forms the basis of the location service's functionality and structure.
·
The architecture of a global, general location
service to provide a ubiquitous infra-structure for location-aware
applications,
·
A policy-based access control to protect
location privacy
Prototype implementations location services and
location-aware applications were
developed to validate the model and architecture.
Further information: Professor Jeff Magee
Department
of Computing
Imperial
College of Science, technology & medicine
180
Queen’s Gate
London
SW7 2BZ
Email:
jnm@doc.ic.ac.uk
Complete Final Report: http://www-dse.doc.ic.ac.uk/~jnm/final-report.html
[1]
Ulf
Leonhardt and Jeff Magee. Multi-Sensor Location Tracking. In Proceedings of the
4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing and
Networking, pages 203-214, Dallas, TX, October 1998.
[2]
Ulf
Leonhardt. Supporting Location-Awareness in Open Distributed Systems. Ph.D.
Thesis, Dept. of Computing, Imperial College London, May 1998. pdf
[3]
Ulf
Leonhardt and Jeff Magee. Security Considerations for a Distributed Location
Service. Journal of Network and Systems Management, 6(1):51-70, March 1998. pdf
[4]
Ulf
Leonhardt and Jeff Magee. Security Considerations for a Distributed Location
Service. 4th Workshop of the OpenView University Association. Madrid, April
2-4, 1997.
[5]
Jeff
Magee, Jeff Kramer and Dimitra Giannakopoulou, Analysing the Behaviour of
Distributed Software Architectures: a Case Study, Proceedings 6th
IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing
Systems, Tunis, Tunisia, October 1997.
[6]
Ulf
Leonhardt and Jeff Magee. Towards a General Location Service for Mobile Environments. In Proceedings of the Third
IEEE Workshop on Services in Distributed and Networked Environments, pages
43-50, Macau, June 1996.
[7]
D.
Chalmers and M. Sloman, A Survey of Quality of Service in Mobile Computing
Environments, IEEE Communications Surveys, April 1999, http://www.comsoc.org/pubs/surveys
[8] D. Chalmers and
M. Sloman, QoS and Context Awareness for Mobile Computing, Intl.
Symposium on Handheld and Ubiqutous Computing (HUC'99), Springer-Verlag,
Sept 1999.