A framework for supporting configuration and automatic integration of heterogeneous location sensors

Abstract

Context awareness is one of crucial aspects of ubiquitous computing and location information is one of important contexts. Several location sensor technologies have been proposed and they show different characteristics such as reliability, precision, and coverage. In order to meet specific needs or to overcome given limitations, various sensor technologies can coexist in a place. Deployment of a location sensor system may require skillful human resources, which are not necessarily available in many places such as homes. For those cases, fully automated or guided configuration is very useful. A location sensor system should be integrated with existing ubiquitous computing system so that any component in the system can exploit location information. We propose a framework that supports user-friendly and guided configuration of a new location sensor system using existing location system and automatic integration of it with location management system. The proposed framework abstracts out the diversity of heterogeneous sensor technologies using Adapters that provide a common interface to location management system. Since guided configuration of a location sensor system requires information provided by the vendor of the location system, we propose a configuration protocol with which a newly deployed location sensor system can provide and obtain configuration options and parameters. An integration protocol is proposed as well so that a newly deployed sensing system can be integrated as part of existing location management system. In order to verify efficiency of the proposed framework, we measured configuration time with our framework and that with manual configuration. Results from experiments of deploying Ubisense on top of WLAN based location sensor system show that proposed framework saves configuration time significantly while manual configuration results in higher accuracy.