PosArc: A Layered Architecture for Development of Seamless Positioning Systems

Position location systems are becoming increasingly important as add-ons to today´s pervasive wireless technology. Positioning systems enable context-aware computing with location awareness. Moreover, Location awareness is a key ingredient to many applications of mobile devices. Devices with the ability to determine their own position in space can retrieve, filter or present information depending on this position. There are, however, different ways to look at this situation resulting in different distributions of computational resources. In this paper, PosArc a new cost-effective and easily deployed layered architecture to provide seamless positioning using GPS and Bluetooth is proposed. It enables users to obtain location information available from nearby devices and access points. The raw location data obtained is transformed into useful position information using local or remote map and web services. Layers in the architecture interact using HTTP and XML protocols. The challenges and related work in the field of positioning systems are also discussed.