Navigation Using Environmental Constraints

Location and mobility management are critical issues for the growing worldwide market in location based services (LBS). Existing research generally requires either special hardware to measure time (thus the distance) and angle or manually constructing database maps using one or a combination of techniques such as lateration, triangulation, database mapping or dead reckoning. In contrast, pathways that uniquely exploit sharing spaces among collaborating objects for the purpose of navigation are far less studied. This paper first analyzes the FreeMobility, a simpler but effective location determination technique, that exploits wireless communications abilities under a broad environmental context; then detailed comparison with database mapping based methods is conducted using measurement data from both GSM and Wi-Fi networks. Results indicate that the adoption of environmental constraints will transform wireless localization research from straightforward hardware dominated approaches to a more independent system approach and thus it opens a new window of opportunity valuable to the research community.