Extensible Platform for Location-Based Services Deployment and Provisioning

Abstract

Location-based services can be considered the most rapidly expanding field of the mobile communications sector. The proliferation of mobile-wireless Internet, the constantly increasing use of handheld, mobile devices and position-tracking technologies, and the emergence of mobile computing prepared the grounds for the introduction of this new type of services with an impressively large application domain and use range. The combination of position-fixing mechanisms with location-dependent, geographical information can offer truly customised, personal communication services through the mobile phone or other type of devices. In this chapter, motivated by the technology advances in the aforementioned areas, we present a generic platform for delivering Location-based services (LBSs) to the nomadic user. The platform features a modular architecture, which can be easily extended. Although the overall architecture of the platform is discussed, the focus is on the technical specifications, the design, the functionality, and the prototype implementation of its central component, the kernel. The kernel is responsible for coordinating communication with the various pluggable components in order to provide the full range of operations involved in the LBS delivery chain (i.e., from initial deployment to invocation, execution, and delivery of results).