Place lab: device positioning using radio beacons in the wild

  • Authors:

  • Anthony LaMarca;Yatin Chawathe;Sunny Consolvo;Jeffrey Hightower;Ian Smith;James Scott;Timothy Sohn;James Howard;Jeff Hughes;Fred Potter;Jason Tabert;Pauline Powledge;Gaetano Borriello;Bill Schilit

  • Affiliations:

  • Intel Research Seattle;Intel Research Seattle;Intel Research Seattle;Intel Research Seattle;Intel Research Seattle;Intel Research Cambridge;Department of Computer Science, UC, San Diego;Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington;Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington;Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington;Information School, University of Washington;Intel Research Seattle;Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington;Intel Research Seattle

  • Venue:
  • PERVASIVE'05 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Pervasive Computing
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Location awareness is an important capability for mobile computing. Yet inexpensive, pervasive positioning—a requirement for wide-scale adoption of location-aware computing—has been elusive. We demonstrate a radio beacon-based approach to location, called Place Lab, that can overcome the lack of ubiquity and high-cost found in existing location sensing approaches. Using Place Lab, commodity laptops, PDAs and cell phones estimate their position by listening for the cell IDs of fixed radio beacons, such as wireless access points, and referencing the beacons' positions in a cached database. We present experimental results showing that 802.11 and GSM beacons are sufficiently pervasive in the greater Seattle area to achieve 20-30 meter median accuracy with nearly 100% coverage measured by availability in people's daily lives.