GIS Ostrava 2009 25. - 28. 1. 2009, Ostrava ___________________________________________________________________ Using of mobile device localization for several types of applications in mobile information systems Ondrej Krejcar 1 1 Department of Measurement and Control, Faculty of Electrical Engeneerings and Computer Science, VŠB Technical University of Ostrava, 17. Listopadu 15, 70833, Ostrava Poruba, Czech Republic ondrej.krejcar@remoteworld.net Abstract. The area of interest is in a model of a radio-frequency based system enhancement for locating and tracking users of our information system inside the buildings. The developed framework as it is described here joins the concepts of location and user tracking as an extension for a new type of mobile information systems. The realized framework uses a WiFi network infrastructure to let a mobile device determine its indoor position. User location can be used by several types of applications. In first case the user location is used for data pre-buffering and pushing information from server to user’s PDA. All server data are saved as artifacts (together) with its position information in building. The accessing of prebuffered data on mobile device can highly improve response time needed to view large multimedia data. In second case the user location information is used for crisis management in large area buildings. Real-time position location can be used to track service personnel (e.g., police officers, rescue teams, fire brigades, etc.), lost children, suspected criminals, and stolen vehicles. Keywords: Wi-Fi; MDA; prebuffering; localization; framework; response time; crissis management 1 Introduction The usage of various wireless technologies has been increased dramatically and would be growing in the following years. This will lead to the rise of new application domains each with their own specific features and needs. Also these new domains will undoubtedly apply and reuse existing (software) paradigms, components and applications. Today this is easily recognized in the miniaturized applications in network-connected PDAs that provide more or less the same functionality as their desktop application equivalents. It is very likely for these new mobile application domains to adapt new paradigms that specifically target the mobile environment. We believe that an important paradigm is context-awareness. Context is relevant to the mobile user, because in a mobile environment the context is often very dynamic and the user interacts differently with the applications on his mobile device when the context is different. While usually a desktop machine is in a fixed context, a mobile device may be used in work, on the road, during the meeting, or at home. Context is not limited to the physical world around the user, but also incorporates the user’s behavior, terminal and network characteristics. Context-awareness concepts can be found as basic principles in a long-term strategic research for mobile and wireless systems such as formulated in [10]. The majority of context-aware computing to date has been restricted to location-aware computing for mobile applications (location- based services). However, position or location information is a relatively simple form of contextual information. To name a few other indicators of context awareness that make up the parametric context space: identity, spatial information (location, speed), environmental information (temperature), resources that are nearby (accessible devices, hosts), availability of resources (battery, display, network, bandwidth), physiological measurements (blood pressure, heart rate), activity (walking, running), schedules and agenda settings. Context-awareness means that anybody is able to use context information. The proliferation of mobile computing devices and local-area wireless networks has fostered a growing interest in location-aware systems and services. A key distinguishing feature of such systems is that the application information and/or interface presented to the user is, in general, a function of his/her physical location. The granularity of needed location information could vary from one application to another. For example, locating a nearby printer requires fairly coarse-grained location information whereas locating a book in a library would require fine-grained information. While much research has been focused on a development of services architectures for location-aware systems, less attention has been paid to the fundamental and challenging problem of locating and tracking mobile users, especially in in-building environments. We focus mainly on RF wireless networks in our research. Our goal is to complement the data networking capabilities of RF wireless LANs with