Enhancing JSR-179 for Positioning System Integration and Management

Several heterogeneous positioning systems are more and more widespread among client wire-less 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 JSR-179 standard specification to allow differentiated forms of visibility/control of low-level positioning characteristics, greater flexibility in lo-cation change-driven event triggering, and the simultaneous management of multiple and dynamically introduced location techniques.