Rover Technology Enabling Scalable Location Aware Computing

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Rover Technology Enabling Scalable Location Aware Computing

This article is submitted by:

Suman Banerjee, Sulabh Agarwal, Kevin Kamel, Andrzej Kochut, Christopher Kommareddy,
Tamer Nadeem, Pankaj Thakkar, Bao Trinh, Adel Youssef, Moustafa Youssef,
Ron Larsen, A. Udaya Shankar, Ashok Agrawala

Abstract
Location-aware computing involves the automatic tailoring of information and services based on the current location of the user. designed and implemented Rover, a system that enables location-based services, as well as the traditional time-aware, user-aware and device-aware services. To achieve system scalability to very large client sets, Rover servers are implemented in an action-based concurrent software architecture that enables ne-grained application specific scheduling of tasks. this seminar demonstrate feasibility through implementations for both outdoor and indoor environments on multiple platforms.


INTRODUCTION
A user is shopping in a mall. On entering a store, he pulls out a PDA and browses through detailed information about the products on display. Satisfied with the information, through the PDA, he makes an online purchase of the items of interest, which will be subsequently shipped to his home directly. As he walks on to the next store, which happens to be a video rental store, information on newly-released movies in his favorite categories are downloaded automatically into his PDA, along with their availability information. He chooses a couple of these movies and indicates that he will pick them up at the storefront. His membership discounts are applied to the bill, and he confirms the charge to his credit card. The intriguing aspect of this scenario is the automatic tailoring of information and services based on the current location of the user. We refer to this paradigm as location-aware computing. The different technology components needed to realize location-aware computing are present today, powered by the increasing capabilities of mobile personal computing devices and the increasing deployment of wireless connectivity (IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs , Bluetooth , Infra-red , Cellular services, etc.) What has hindered its ubiquitous deployment is the lack of system-wide integration of these components in a manner that scales with large user populations. In this paper, we describe the design and initial implementation experience of such a system, which we call Rover, and discuss the impact such a system can have on the next generation of applications, devices, and users. Rover enables services with the following characteristics: