Enhancing JSR-179 for Positioning System Integration and Management

Several heterogeneous positioning systems are more and more widespread among client wireless terminals, thus leveraging the market relevance of Location Based Services (LBSs). Positioning techniques are very differentiated, e.g., in terms of precision, accuracy, and battery/bandwidth consumption, and several of them are simultaneously available at clients. That motivates novel middleware solutions capable of integrating the dynamically accessible positioning techniques, of controlling them in a synergic way, and of switching from a positioning system to another at service provisioning time by choosing the most suitable solution depending on application-level LBS context. In this perspective, the paper proposes the original PoSIM solution, which significantly extends the emerging JSR179 standard specification to allow differentiated forms of visibility/control of low-level positioning characteristics, greater flexibility in location change-driven event triggering, and the simultaneous management of multiple and dynamically introduced location techniques.