A location based service platform: for the next generation of
mobile devices, including intelligent position updates

Abstract: The purpose of this master thesis is to design and develop a Location Based
Service (LBS) platform for Application Service Providers (ASP). LBS are
services that are aware of and tailored to a user’s geographical location.
Potential systems that can use this kind of platform are fleet management,
communication, entertainment safety and security systems

During this thesis, several application programming interfaces has been
developed and designed to meet the current demand and requirement for such a
platform. The platform supports trigger based services, i.e. it pushes
information to an ASP. The trigger information is based on the combination of
a user’s location and the personal preferences of the user. The ASP creates
search profiles that are matched against the user’s personal profile.

The platform is able to keep track of certain geographical areas. When a
user, matching a search profile defined by an ASP, is entering one of the
areas, the platform senses this and sends required information to users and
ASPs. Also trigger conditions concerning if to or more users are close to
each other can be set as well as if the user is within a certain geographical
are and close to another individual at the same time.

This report also covers the area of minimizing the position updates from the
users to the system. This is especially important in the sense of minimizing
network traffic and increasing user’s privacy. ASPs do not, in most services,
have to now where the users are located at all time, but only when their
location and preferences are fulfilling a predefined condition set by a
certain ASP. Therefore an algorithm, Position Update Relative to Minimum
Distance (PUR2MD) has been developed, managing position updates. The
algorithm is compared to having a fixed position update frequency based on
time or distance respectively.