Location Transparency Call (LTC) System: An Intelligent Phone Dialing System Based on the Phone of Things (PoT) Architecture

Abstract

Phone of Things (PoT) extends the connectivity options for IoT systems by leveraging the ubiquitous phone network infrastructure, making it part of the IoT architecture. PoT enriches the connectivity options of IoT while promoting its affordability, accessibility, security, and scalability. PoT enables incentive IoT applications that can result in more innovative homes, office environments, and telephony solutions. This paper presents the Location Transparency Call (LTC) system, an intelligent phone dialing system for businesses based on the PoT architecture. The LTC system intelligently mitigates the impact of missed calls on companies and provides high availability and dynamic reachability to employees within the premises. LTC automatically forwards calls to the intended employees to the closest phone extensions at their current locations. Location transparency is achieved by actively maintaining and dynamically updating a real-time database that maps the persons’ locations using the RFID tags they carry. We demonstrate the system’s feasibility and usability and evaluate its performance through a fully-fledged prototype representing its hardware and software components that can be applied in real situations at large scale.