iGeoNoti: A fine-grained indoor geo-notification system

The emergence of geofences makes it easy to push geo-notifications. It is important for pedestrians in indoor environments to receive notifications in certain rooms as well as different floors. The existing methods only use the characteristics of the wireless signal to distinguish geofences. However, wireless signals are unstable in some areas and often limited to a single floor. This may poses problems to deliver geo-notifications in multi-floor indoor environments. In this paper, we propose iGeoNoti, a fine-grained indoor geo-notification system. It adopts indoor pedestrian reachable distance (PRD) to define an indoor geofence represented by the graph. The isolated rooms and floors can be thus represented as the whole one graph-based indoor geofence. As a proof of concept, the system provides a web user interface to describe indoor geofence scenarios according to the understandable semantic rules. We evaluate iGeoNoti in real world. The experimental results show that it is easy to define indoor geofence in our proposed system by using the PRD-based rule and geo-notifications can be triggered in fine-grained locations.