PerPos: A Translucent Positioning Middleware Supporting Adaptation of Internal Positioning Processes

Overview & Synopsis

A positioning middleware benefits the development of location aware applications. Traditionally, positioning middleware provides position transparency in the sense that it hides low-level details. However, many applications require access to specific details of the usually hidden positioning process. To address this problem this paper proposes a positioning middleware named PerPos that is translucent and adaptable, i.e., it supports both high- and low-level interaction. The PerPos middleware provides translucency with respect to the positioning process and allows programmatic definition of application specific features that can be applied to the internal position processing of the middleware. To evaluate these capabilities we extend the internal position processing of the middleware with functionality supporting probabilistic position tracking and strategies for minimization of the energy consumption. The result of the evaluation is that using only the proposed capabilities we can, in a structured manner, extend the internal positioning processing.