Location-based services on a smart campus: A system and a study

Knowledge about people's geographical location can be used to infer their possible needs, and to offer relevant services to satisfy these needs. Such targeted approach in service demand identification and service delivery is one of the reasons why Location-Based Services (LBS) are so popular in our days. In this paper, we describe a framework that we developed for offering location-based services, relying on infrastructure typically available in smart campus environments. Our framework includes three user-facing components: 1) an energy-aware Android application for end users to recognize their locations and access the services available to them; 2) a web application, which enables end users to search for services available on the campus as a whole; and 3) a web application for managers to specify what services are available on campus and in which areas. Each of these applications communicates with a server from the middle layer. Finally, a PostgreSQL database constitutes the framework's back-end, where information about the available services and their spatial scope is maintained. We evaluate the performance of our framework in terms of localization accuracy, since this is the most critical quality for the effective delivery of location-based services.