Enhancing the Map Usage for Indoor Location-Aware Systems

Location-aware systems are receiving more and more interest in both academia and industry due to their promising prospective in a broad category of so-called Location-Based-Services (LBS). The map interface plays a crucial role in the location-aware systems, especially for indoor scenarios. This paper addresses the usage of map information in a Wireless LAN (WLAN)-based indoor navigation system. We describe the benefit of using map information in multiple algorithms of the system, including radio-map generation, tracking, semantic positioning and navigation. Then we discuss how to represent or model the indoor map to fulfill the requirements of intelligent algorithms. We believe that a vector-based multi-layer representation is the best choice for indoor location-aware system. Keyword: Location-Aware Systems, WLAN Positioning, Map Representation