Infrared-based User Location Tracking System for Indoor Environments

Abstract

In this paper, we propose ubiTrack, a system which tracks users' location in indoor environments by employing infrared-based proximity method. Most of recently developed systems have focussed on performance and accuracy. For this reason, they adopted the idea of centralized management, which gathers all information in a main system to monitor users' location. However, these systems raise privacy concerns in ubiquitous computing environments where tons of sensors are seamlessly embedded into environments. In addition, centralized systems also need high computational power to support multiple users. The proposed ubiTrack is designed as a passive mobile architecture to relax privacy problems. Moreover, ubiTrack utilizes appropriate area as a unit to efficiently track users. To achieve this, ubiTrack overlaps each sensing area by utilizing the TDM (Time-Division Multiplexing) method. Additionally, ubiTrack exploits various filtering methods at each receiver and utilization module. The filtering methods minimize unexpected noise effect caused by external shock or intensity weakness of ID signal at the boundary of sensing area. ubiTrack can be applied not only to location-based applications but also to context-aware applications because of its associated module. This module is a part of middleware to support communication between heterogeneous applications or sensors in ubiquitous computing environments.