Location Awareness in Community Wireless LANs

The growing availability of wireless LAN technologies together with the pervasive use of mobile and embedded computing devices gives strong raise for internet services adapted to context, particularly the location of their use. In multi-user cooperation environments for closed area communities like learning and teaching teams in wireless university campus networks, location awareness is of substantial importance. The provision of location based services based on IEEE 802.11 WLAN technology is limited with respect to the automated provision of geographical position information of mobile devices or “users” respectively. For the seamless delivery of location based internet services in campus area wireless networks we propose to enhance IEEE 802.11 WLAN positioning capabilities by the integration of RFID technologies. We have developed a multi-user team awareness framework, CampusSpace, that on-the-fly and transparently collects and interprets position information of mobiles from the signal to noise ratio of IEEE 802.11 radios, and cartographically mapped RFID tags respectively. Up-to-the-moment position information is made available for a multitude of services on a centralized wireless campus location server in a generic representation within the RDF (Resource Description Framework).