Exploiting the associated information to locate mobile users in ubiquitous computing environment

Although GPS is deemed as ubiquitous outdoor localization technology, we are still far from a similar technology for indoor environments. Though a number of techniques are proposed for indoor localization, they are separated efforts that are way from a real ubiquitous localization system. Our real-world experience from InSpace, a pervasive computing system with wireless devices to provide intelligent services to users, shows that locating mobile users remains very challenging due to various interfering factors. We analyze real traces of mobile phones carried by users and find that mobile users exhibit temporal-spatial stability and neighborhood relativity. Motivated by this observation, we develop a Mobile Boundary Localization approach, MBL, to exploit the associated information to locate mobile users. This localization approach uses different treatment in different conditions and lets each mobile phone try to estimate its possible location range. We have implemented and evaluated MBL by extensive real-world experiments in InSpace and simulations. The results demonstrate that MBL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art localization approaches with more accurate, efficient, and consistent performance. © 2011 IEEE