Accurately determining a user's floor location is essential for minimizing delays in emergency response. This paper presents a floor localization system intended for emergency calls. We aim to provide floor-level accuracy with minimum infrastructure support. Our approach is to use multiple sensors, all available in today's smartphones, to trace a user's vertical movements inside buildings.We make three contributions. First, we present a hybrid architecture for floor localization with emergency calls in mind. The architecture combines beacon-based infrastructure and sensor-based dead reckoning, striking the right balance between accurately determining a user's location and minimizing the required infrastructure. Second, we present the elevator module for tracking a user's movement in an elevator. The elevator module addresses three core challenges that make it difficult to accurately derive displacement from acceleration. Third, we present the stairway module which determines the number of floors a user has traveled on foot. Unlike previous systems that track users' foot steps, our stairway module uses a novel landing counting technique.

Currently, text communication cannot be used to ask for help in emergency situations. Even in the Next Generation 9-1-1 system, an IP/SIP-based emergency communication system, there has been no investigation into how text communications such as Instant Messaging (IM) and Short Message Service (SMS) can be integrated. We identify the technical challenges in the integration of IM and SMS networks with the NG9-1-1 system, and propose a solution for each challenge. We also describe a working prototype system using our approach.

Abstract-An important group of location-based services (LBS), including 9-1-1 service, rely on the mapping between a user's location and a service boundary in order to select the appropriate service provider. In such cases, mobile clients can cache the mapping information to reduce service latency and server load. However, caching such a mapping can be burdensome on mobile devices because representing the polygon that defines a service boundary requires a large amount of data.We present GeoPS-PD, a polygon simplification algorithm designed for LBS applications. Unlike existing algorithms, GeoPS-PD never produces a false positive, is tunable at runtime for the desired balance between target polygon size and area coverage, and optionally takes into account the population density. We demonstrate the efficacy of GeoPS-PD using the US state boundary data. For New York, GeoPS-PD produces a simplified polygon which is only 3% of the original size, yet covers 95% of the original area, and makes the LBS queries 3.17 times faster.

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