A multi-technology location-aware wireless system for interactive fruition of multimedia contents

Nowadays, due to the increasing demands of the fast-growing consumer electronics (CEs) market, more powerful mobile consumer devices are being introduced continuously. With this evolution of CEs technologies, many sophisticated electronic applications starts to be developed and applied to context and location aware scenarios. This paper proposes a flexible communication architecture well suited for the interactive fruition of historical and artistic contents throughout a wireless network infrastructure. The designed system and the implemented low cost testbed integrate different communication technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS with the aim of offering, in a transparent and reliable way, a mixed set of different multimedia and augmented reality (AR) contents to mobile users equipped with CEs devices. This communication architecture represents a first step to provide a network support to context-aware applications pushing the ubiquitous computing paradigm into the reality.