Location awareness as an adjunct to mobility

1. Location awareness as an adjunct to mobility TF-Mobility Mark O’Leary July 8th 2008

2. In a nutshell… • Mobile devices use network technologies that can provide user location and context cues. • Location data can expand the variety of mobile applications through delivery of relevant, timely, personalised content reactive to dynamic environments. • Dual aspects: • allowing mobile nodes to determine their own position (relative to other resources) • allowing the network operator to monitor the position of nodes The education community could (should?) deploy location-aware systems in a number of contexts to the direct benefit of their users.

3. Possible technologies • Log file extraction • e.g. eduroam RADIUS logs • GPS • Smartphone cell localisation • e.g. calibre [1] • 802.11 ‘Beacon Stuffing’ [2] • Location inference from IP • (e.g. IP2GEO [3]) • [1]http://research.microsoft.com/users/jckrumm/Publications%202008/calibree.pdf • [2]http://research.microsoft.com/research/mns/papers/WiFiAds-HotMobile2007.pdf • [3]http://research.microsoft.com/~padmanab/papers/sigmetrics2001.ps

4. Standards • Developments at present seem focused upon the individual organisation or campus: the roaming case and/or the sharing of location data in a portable format is ignored. • Need a way for a user to advertise their location • to the spatio-temporal resolution of their choice • in a privacy-protecting manner. • Need a way for network operators to • share ‘bulk’ location data • tag resources for ‘location-relevance’ It might be necessary to initiate standardisation effort for various relevant location technologies.

5. Privacy concerns • Must be ‘Opt in’ – legal requirements • Uptake will depend on compelling applications for the user • ‘Blurring’ location data: • spatial cloaking (confuse with other people) • vagueness (“home”, “work”, “school”) • rounding measurements (e.g. snap to a 50m grid) • adding noise to measurements • dropped samples Review policy in this area at existing deployments and work towards harmonised principles in the use of location data.

6. Data privacy sensitivity

7. Sample application 1 Eduroam ‘Weathermap’ • central radius logs parsed to generate graphical output • could be of use in performance and capacity planning and promoting the eduroam concept.

8. Sample application 2 ‘eduroam-plus’ • eduroam users still require local assistance to find resources like printers, vacant meeting rooms, first aid etc. at a site they haven’t visited before. • Location cues could be fed back via the eduroam system to a repository describing such resources, which could then generate a customised ‘portal’ for the user. • Such a system would be a good candidate for a federated approach?

9. Sample application 3 Conference Social Networking • Delegate at a conference builds a ‘target list’ of people they want to meet • Application on their mobile device notifies them when they are close to one of these people (and the target has indicated their status as open to approach) • Equally, could reserve periods of time when one wishes to avoid interruptions

10. JANET(UK) location trials • Context-relevant guidance & interactive maps incl. PlaceLab deployment • ‘RF firewalls’ – access control based upon requesting node location • Automated attendance registration through device presence • Asset tracking • Policy and implementation on the aggregation, storage and release of location data • Comparison of existing off-the-shelf location appliances

11. Proposed Activities • Establish a forum for sharing experience with and promoting location technologies • Develop a technical knowledge base (standards, issues, market, trends) • Examine privacy and policy issues • Develop and trial inter-NREN location-aware initiatives • Consider the impact of future location-aware services on general mobility support • Work with and influence existing standardisation efforts and open source projects