Hybrid Localization for Ubiquitous Services

The business sector is exploring the locations and movements information of mobile users with the purpose to improve the business operations and increase the sales volume. In this scenario, the location systems should be able of tracking the mobile users in any place they move to, both indoor and outdoor scenarios. In this paper, we propose a hybrid location approach designed to support the choice and the switching between different positioning technologies supported by the mobile device and available in the surrounding environment, in a dynamic and transparent way during the user movement. It combines signal strength-based fingerprinting techniques for indoor positioning together with GPS for the outdoor localization, and performs opportunistic technology switching according to a threshold based mechanism. The resulting solution is able to leverage the different features of the location technologies, in order to provide ubiquitous services across indoor and outdoor scenarios, as well as to minimize power consumption of the mobile device.