Enabling location‐based services in wireless LAN hotspots

Abstract

The wide deployment of IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN (WLAN) makes possible application services developed in WLAN hotspots. Owing to the small cell size in WLAN hotspots, it is practical to develop locationbased services with the awareness of the WLAN access points (APs) that mobile devices currently access. In this paper, we propose an effective location determination technique using the inherent SNMP support in WLAN APs. It is shown that the current location of a mobile device can be determined from the SNMP traps sent by APs. Since the SNMP-based approach doesn't need any particular software or hardware in mobile devices, location-based services can be widely deployed, especially in public WLAN hotspots. To further enable location-based services through the WWW, this paper also considers the location determination of a mobile device from its IP address, retrieved in a WWW environment. In addition, we propose a web service framework for location-based services in WLAN hotspots. Thus, location-based services can be developed in a standard way.