Location-Based Services (LBS) in Micro-Scale Navigation

Abstract

Pedestrians LBS are accessible by hand-held devices and become a large field of energetic research since the recent developments in wireless communication, mobile technologies and positioning techniques. LBS applications provide services like finding the neighboring facility within a certain area such as the closest restaurants, hospital, or public telephone. With the increased demand for richer mobile services, LBS propose a promising add-on to the current services offered by network operators and third-party service providers such as multimedia contents. The performance of LBS systems is directly affected by each component forming its architecture. Firstly, the end-user mobile device is still experiencing a lack of enough storage, limitations in CPU capabilities and short battery lifetime. Secondly, the mobile wireless network is still having problems with the size of bandwidth, packet loss, congestions and delay. Additionally, in spite of the fact that GPS is the most accurate navigation system, there are still some issues in micro scale navigation, mainly availability and accuracy. Finally, LBS server which hosts geographical and users information is experiencing difficulties in managing the huge size of data which causes a long query processing time. This paper presents a technical investigation and analysis of the performance of each component of LBS system for pedestrian navigation, through conducting several experimental tests in different locations. The results of this investigation have pinpointed the weaknesses of the system in micro-scale environments. In addition, this paper proposes a group of solutions and recommendations for most of these shortcomings.

Client-Server Based LBS Architecture

“…A bidirectional mobile/wireless communication link is utilised between the mobile device and the positioning server. The capability of current mobile communications for such configurations along with the server side performance limitations was analysed and investigated thoroughly in (Hunait et al, 2004;Alhajri et al, 2008;Almasri et al, 2009). As mentioned earlier, the mobile device transmits its GPS data (raw and/or coordinate measurements) in case of an integrity failure to the positioning server, which is responsible for efficient position correction and calculation.…”

The Impact of Zoning Concept on Data-Flow Management within LBS System Components

“…SMS) which are widely used nowadays. Therefore, there is a need to organise the flow of data to prevent any network congestion or delay which might occur as a result of flooding the network bandwidth (Almasri et al, 2009) A good strategy to tackle this issue is establishing data management flow techniques mainly, associated with the server side of LBS system as it is the core of the entire system. This enables performing changes on one element of the system that will reflect on the performance of other elements of LBS, i.e.…”