Technology Seamless Mobile Terminal Based Context Sensing Project

Suggested size

Master's Thesis/15ECTS project; workload: 20% theoretical/80% practical.

Objective

Prove that location data from different technologies can be acquired by a mobile terminal and used as context in the service oriented Event Bus framework.

Goal

Construct and demonstrate software for

• a mobile terminal (Android phone) that can forward GPS and Bluetooth based tracking information to a SOA based Event Bus.
• a service connected to the Event Bus that can perform sensor fusion of GPS and Bluetooth data.

Content

The Event Bus is a framework being developed in the Genie research project at ITU and Peking University. It is a SOA based framework for supporting context aware systems and applications. Basically, context is sent by event producers to the Event Bus as events consisting of key-value pairs, and event consumers can subscribe to events matching specific patterns.

Currently, only infrastructure based event producers exist: the Blip System deployed at ITU emits Bluetooth tracking data to the Event Bus. This project will demonstrate that the mobile terminal can also be an event producer, sending location data to the event bus.

Mobile terminals like Android phones can track their position using GPS and send this information to the Event Bus. Further, these terminals can inquire for Bluetooth nodes in the vicinity, providing landmark based location information. In particular, the Blip nodes located on the upper floors of ITU respond to inquiry, and can thus provide such Bluetooth based landmark data.

Concretely, this project will produce software for the mobile terminal, as well as some services connected the Event Bus necessary for sensor fusion (GPS and Bluetooth), and finally some application for demonstration purposes (e.g. an active map displaying users' locations).

• Design and implement client application software that transmits GPS data from the mobile terminal to the Event Bus.
• Design and implement a sensor fusion module that can merge GPS and Bluetooth tracking data, and attach this module to the Event Bus.
• Make a location based application for demonstration purposes; perhaps just extend ITUitter.

Possible supervisors

Literature

• Francesco Zanitti: Documentation for the Event Bus
• Cristiano di Flora, Massimo Ficco and Stefano Russo: An Architecture for Providing Java Applications with Indoor and Outdoor Hybrid Location Sensing. Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE Workshop on Software Technologies for Future Embedded and Ubiquitous Systems and Second International Workshop on Collaborative Computing, Integration, and Assurance (SEUS-WCCIA'06). IEEE 2006.
• Pasquale Pace, Gianluca Aloi and Antonio Palmacci: A Multi-Technology Location-Aware Wireless System for Interactive Fruition of Multimedia Contents. IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 55, No. 2, May 2009.
• Ling Pei, Ruizhi Chen, Yuewei Chen, Helena Leppakoski, Arto Perttulan: Indoor/Outdoor Seamless Positioning Technologies Integrated on Smart Phone. 2009 First International Conference on Advances in Satellite and Space Communications. IEEE 2009.
• Jüaut;rgen Bohn and Harald Vogt: Robust Probabilistic Positioning based on High-Level Sensor-Fusion and Map Knowledge Technical Report No. 421, Institute for Pervasive Computing Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich, Switzerland. April 2003.
• GPS World: Business Outlook: The Case for GPS, FM, Bluetooth Integration. September 2008.
• Android documentation.
• JSR-179 documentation.
• Other sensor fusion literature.