FLAVOUR - Friendly Location-aware Conference Aid with PriVacy Observant ArchitectURe

Context-aware applications are emerging on the daily basis and location information proves to be one of the key components to develop context-aware applications upon. This stems from the fact that location information enables and facilitates reasoning about what users are doing (user’s behavioural patterns) and what users are interested in. Over the years many localization algorithms have been evolved to determine the location of entities using various technologies. In this paper, a novel localization technique using the geometrical properties of the building to increase accuracy, thus eliminating the need for calibration is presented. In addition a privacy-sensitive, location-aware service architecture called FLAVOUR is proposed, which utilizes the presented localization technique. FLAVOUR uses existing WLAN infrastructure for cost efficiency, and uniquely incorporates the location information into Jini service discovery platform. A new method of classifying existing WLAN localization techniques is introduced and the important evaluation criteria for assessing such techniques are discussed.