Advanced techniques for localisation and its applications to future mobile systems

• Main Author: Honary, Mahsa
• Published: Lancaster University 2012
• Subjects: 621.3845
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.662186

The massive deployment of Location Based Services has been predicted for many years, but progress so far has been slow. The benefits for business operation, efficiency and customer choice in commerce have been identified by researchers, and a whole range of new services for customers can be conceived. Yet there are clearly barriers to implementation. One barrier to deployment is user concern over loss of privacy, where it is believed that early adopters will demonstrate the tangible benefits from using these technologies far outweigh the worries over privacy. A second barrier is the lack of a suitable location technology, in that: • GPS receivers have been built into mobile phones, but suffer from high power consumption and poor performance indoors and in urban areas. • Cellular positioning techniques require little additional power, but provide insufficient precision for many applications, particularly for indoor positioning . The research conducted in this PhD has been concentrated on real-world applications, and the methodologies to provide accurate indoor positioning and context acquisition on standard mobile phones. Key outcomes from the novel research completed include: • Investigations into Classification techniques which can reduce the computational complexity of running positioning algorithms on standard mobile phones. Improvements in accuracy and scalability for W-LAN indoor fingerprinting location estimation algorithms. • Abstraction of Contextual information from low level sensors which may be used to compliment location estimation algorithms The originality of the research completed has resulted in four publications that have concentrated on practical approaches for 'Any time, Anywhere' accurate positioning.