ACHIEVING DIGITAL HOME SERVICE BY USING POSITIONING

TECHNIQUE IN SENSOR NETWORK

Yau-Ren Gao1, Tien-Yu Hsu2, Chih-Ming Hsieh1 and Yu-Ta Lien1

1
Networks and Multimedia Institute, Institute for Information Industry
6F., No. 218, Sec. 2, Dunhua S. Rd., Taipei, 106, Taiwan, R.O.C.
2
Department of Information, National Museum of Natural Science
1, Kuan Chien Rd., Taichung, Taiwan, R.O.C.
yzgao@nmi.iii.org.tw

Abstract that an AP receives as references to intelligently adjust

The digital home service has been introduced as an
abstract concept enabling users to access and
personalize their customized services no matter what
the terminal they use. In digital era, applications and
services of home service are needed to be intelligent
and convenient in order to satisfy our need.
In this paper, we develop a position algorithm in
sensor network to find out the location of the person in
the house. Since this service will be available over
heterogeneous network, users would like to access
them in a personalized way, transparently
independently of the underlying network technology
and particular terminal used.
1. Introduction
Context-aware [18] computing is a rising technology
in the recent years. Context-aware technology can be
used in many domains, such as guiding services,
intelligent controls, health care, and security services.
Location is the most important element in all kinds of
context. With localization technologies, we can acquire
the locations of users, devices, etc. This helps users
access their desired services according to their
locations.
Indoor positioning is a critical research issue.
Different radio systems have their own characteristics.
In this paper, we will focus on the RF-based
positioning system. This kind of positioning system
has two drawbacks. First, the required training process
is time-consuming. Second, the precision of positions
still needs to be improved. We propose two methods to
solve these problems. First, we use interpolation
mechanisms to relieve the labor-intensive training
procedure and improve the positioning precision.
Second, we use access points (APs) as references of
each other. Specifically, we use the signal strengths
our training database. This is expected to significantly
improve the positioning precision.
2. Virtual home environment
Virtual Home Environment (VHE) [1,4-
7,10,13,14,20] is an environment that enables the user
to get customized and personalized services, regardless
of terminal type, access network or location. Due to
the personalized services are desired by anyone
nowadays, it makes the development of VHE even
faster. VHE is based on standardized service
capabilities that are consistently presented, allowing
the user to always have a same look and feel of the
service as well as the same service experience,
irrespectively of the access network or the kind of
terminal he uses each time.
In this way the user will not see a difference in
using his services while roaming in other networks. It
presents one user accessing his service from various
kinds of terminals such as laptop, PC, mobile phone
and through various networks that he even might not
be aware of. Modifications to his service profile made
with one terminal will of course be valid on all
terminals he is using, and in all networks. VHE offers
a more flexible and suitable service for everyone and
makes us take the advantage of existing technology to
achieve more advanced application to improve our
life’s quality.
2.1. The relation between VHE and UMTS
VHE is an important feature of UMTS (Universal
Mobile Telecommunications System) [9]. UMTS
represents an evolution in terms of capacity, data
speeds and new service capabilities from second-
generation mobile networks. 3G/UMTS offers mobile
operators significant capacity and broadband

Terminal
Terminal
Application
Equipment service
VHE Component
MExE(
WAP,
USAT
Java,
i-mode)
Network Component
Figure1: VHE terminal and service portal
capabilities to support larger numbers of voice and
data customers - especially in urban center - plus
higher data rates at lower incremental cost than 2G.
Crucially, 3G/UMTS has been specified as an
integrated solution for mobile voice and data with wide
area coverage.
Specified as an end-to-end mobile system,
3G/UMTS also features the additional benefits of
automatic international roaming plus integral security
and billing functions, allowing operators to migrate
from 2G to 3G [3,8,16,17] while retaining many of
their existing back-office systems. Offering increased
capacity and speed at lower incremental cost compared
with second generation mobile systems, 3G/UMTS
gives operators the flexibility to introduce new
multimedia services to business users and consumers
while offering an enhanced user experience.
This in turn provides the opportunity for operators
to build on the brand-based relationships they already
enjoy with their customers - and drive new revenue
opportunities by encouraging additional traffic,
stimulating new usage patterns and strengthening
customer loyalty. In brief, 3G/UMTS will offer
enterprise customers and consumers all the benefits of
broadband connectivity while on the move.
2.2. Benefits of VHE
Service Portal
(Home Gateway)
Control Electric
Application Service
VHE Component
OSA API
Network Component
HTTP
TCP/IP
Ethernet WiFi
It should be noted that user's view of VHE is
independent of home, visited network, or the terminal
currently used. This is stuck by the fundamental VHE
idea, according to which the user does not want to
worry about technical details of the resources he is
currently using, but is only interested in his
personalized environment. HE (Home Environment) is
the entity responsible for overall VHE provision and
control of the PSE (Personal Service Environment) of
its subscribers. It should not be confused with the HN
(Home Network), which is a term describing the
network operator with which the user has a contract
about provisioning of basic telecommunication
services. HE can, but does not necessarily have to be
under the direct control of HN operator. VASP (Value
Added Service Provider) is a new role, enabled by
OSA (Open Service Access) [6,16] concept. Basically,
it can be viewed as a third party service provider, since
OSA enables network operators to offer their network
resources to independent contractors.
In the perspective of VHE, the network architecture
is proposed as a highly flexible and scalable UMTS
core network, providing multimedia and real or non-
real time services.
„ VHE provides users with the ability to receive
customized and personalized services with a
 common look and feel, wherever and on
whatever kind of terminal.
„ VHE offers the network operators the flexibility
to develop customized services across different
networks (e.g. cellular or satellite networks),
without requiring modifications of the
underlying network infrastructure.
„ VHE offers the service providers a set of
components for flexible service creation,
enabling them to develop services whose
appearance adapts to the network and terminal
capabilities.
3. Digital home service
3.1. System architecture
For the purpose of providing VHE service, the
module can handle VHE service is needed in terminal
device and service provider. In figure 1, the left side is
the structure on the terminal. The top layer is
“Terminal Application”. For example browser is
obliged to communicate between demands of user and
VHE modules. The VHE module on the terminal
device converts the user’s command to standard
environment mobile phone command. (USAT and
Service Portal
(Home Gateway)
Control Electric
Application Service
Equipment service
VHE Component
OSA API
Network Component
HTTP
TCP/IP
Ethernet WiFi
Figure 2: Service portal and home server
MExE in figure 1). Afterward it will use the network
component to send information to the service portal
side. In scenario of our design, service portal can
provide the service for end users. As shown in figure,
control electric equipment service and application
service could provide the service like control
information appliance, download service or image
streaming, etc.
And then Service Portal connects to the Home
Server that provides the service practically. As shown
in the right side of figure 1 when service portal and
home server communicate with each other, the service
portal will convert the command from application
service to OSA API. The component connects to the
OSA gateway on the home server will replace the
original service on the home server. In the service
provided on the home server, it will use the UPnP AV
architecture to support the management of multimedia
and use ZigBee [21] as the intermediate interface
device for controlling the information appliance. The
structure of service portal and home server of our
architecture is shown in figure 2.
In short term, "ubiquitous" is a keyword describing
VHE. We argue that it is better to offer basic
functionalities available everywhere, than advanced
services available only in a small amount of non-
standardized environments. By the way, we aim to
Home Server
Home Server
OSA Gateway
Protocol Interflow Service
UPnP ZigBee
SSCP GENA SOAP Power
HTTP API Line,
TCP,UDP Security USB,
IP,ICMP Network UWB,
GSM MAC …
Ethernet WiFi
/3G PHY
provide support for today's customary technologies.
Additionally, to ensure service portability in open
environments, we use only toolkits standardized by
3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) [12-
16,20] such as OSA. Furthermore, security
requirements have been considered from the earliest
design phases, and the solutions based on Internet
standards (SSL and digital signatures) have been
proposed. All of these factors combined make the
proposed architecture suitable for implementation in
real-life conditions.
3.2. Reconfiguration actions
For 3G networks and beyond, an open marketplace
is expected to emerge, with a large number of diverse
services, not necessarily targeted solely to mobile
networks (e.g., digital services in the home). This
situation creates the need for more flexible networks
that can be reconfigured dynamically to meet the
requirements of the multitude of services provided
over them. Network reconfiguration to adapt a service
may occur either during service deployment or during
service activation and execution. Some examples of
the types of reconfiguration actions that would be
useful in a mobile network are the following:
„ QoS (Quality of service) provisioning: Network
equipment such as routers could require changes
in their configuration so that they can identify
transport flows corresponding to the usage of a
particular service and provide them the desired
QoS.
„ User customization: Since the context of a
roaming user may change frequently, user
profiles should be updated (e.g., user terminal
interface preferences, location specific
preferences), and subsequently service profiles
should be adapted. For example, to allow a user
to access new location-dependent services.
„ Charging and paying service: Different charging
models may be possible depending on
provisioned services. The system used to collect
service usage data, process it and calculate the
corresponding charges for the end-user, should
be reconfigurable dynamically.
The OSA framework as it is currently defined is
inadequate to fulfill the need for network
reconfigurability, QoS requirements, user
customization, and support of adaptable service
provision and flexible charging schemes. OSA does
not address the requirements of residential gateways
for digital homes. Consequently, the OSA framework
needs to be extended adequately. According to
OSA/Parlay, edge-of-network applications should
provide some interfaces of their own, which are used
by the network-based service components as callbacks
for notifications and event reports. The applications
interact with the OSA/Parlay framework by providing
it with the pointers to these callback methods.
The relationship between an OSA/Parlay application
and the OSA/Parlay service components is thus
markedly similar to the relationship between the
service switching and service control functions in
intelligent networks. The methods are used instead of
protocols and the services have a much broader scope
of control. The thing that is necessary is the definition
of a component object model for OSA/Parlay and
supplementary services. Once such model is available,
any supporting architecture will be able to
transparently take care of issues like replications,
migration and activation. Services will then be
executed in specialized virtual environments, where
they will enjoy the services mentioned above plus
access to the open interfaces exposed by the
underlying network.
4. Application
There are many ways to generating positioning
module. In this paper, we will use the Nearest
Neighbor algorithm. The signal strength collected the
first n phase will be saved in the format of （x, y, ss1,
ss2, …, ssn）into the database. If the signal is too weak
or we didn’t receive the signal, we will use a tiny value
to represent it such as -100 dBm. The collected data
are shown as the following table. The notation x in the
table means the location of the record and meanwhile
ss1, ss2, …, ssn represent the signal strength of each
access point. We can use these signal strength values
to distinguish the difference between each training
node.
Table 1 The structure of the database
DATABASE
Signal Signal
Signal
Strength … Strength
Strength 1
x n
Sample 1 -72 -80 -100
Sample 2 -60 -82 -100
.....
Sample m -48 -100 -30
When we start to do the positioning, the program
will use the signal strength collected by the user’s
mobile device. The positioning system will start to
calculate which training node is most suitable to
represent this real-time phase’s signal strength. In the
method of Nearest Neighbor, comparing method is
going through by the data in the positioning module
and it will choose the shortest Euclidean distance of all
real-time signal strength. For instance, the real-time
signal strength value is（sso1, sso2, …, sson）. The i-th
data in the positioning module is（ssi1, ssi2, …, ssin）,
then the Euclidean distance di between two data is:
The smallest one di will be regarded as the training
node that most close to the real-time strength. By
means of this way we can decide the current location
of the user.
Another way is to use the conditional probabilistic
to guess the probability that sample could show on
each training node. The first phase data collection
method is same as the previous one. But in this
mechanism we will keep the data in every training
node rather than calculate the average. Thus we can
induct the distribution of every direction and every
access point for each training node. The distribution of
the testing signal is shown in the following figure:
Figure3: The distribution of signal strength
As long as we collect enough data, it is not difficult
to find out the distribution is like Gaussian distribution.
And then we will use this distribution to find out the
training node that close to the real-time signal the most.
St is the real-time signal received in time t by some
mobile device. When there are n access point, it can be
described as St =（ss1 , ss2 , …, ssn）.
Assume figure 3 is the collected result of some
access point i, we can use Freq function to query the
appearance frequency of ssi. If we accumulate
appearance frequency corresponding to the signal
strength of access point 1~n,
Sim( St , TN ) = Σ Freq ( ssi )
We can compare the similarity (Sim) of each training
node (TN) and real-time signal and use the Prob
function to sort the similarity of each training node
Prob( St ) : sorted list of Sim ( St, TN )
Probi shows the similarity of i-th training node in the
sorting result. Finally we use the most similar training
node to surmise the location of the user.
We could adjust the width (bin) of the figure of
signal distribution to match up the different
environment for the purpose of increasing the accuracy.
For example, the unit in the distribution figure is 1dBm.
It could change the sensitivity of recording signal by
modifying the width (bin). Because the signal in
802.11 is not stable, it could not obtain the best result
by using the finest distribution. Therefore, it is
necessary to design an adjustable parameter to match
up a variation of environment.
5. Conclusion and future work
This paper proposed architecture for providing VHE
support to roaming users. Besides the central problem
of personal mobility, this paper also addressed the
development of services using standardized
telecommunication network APIs, such as OSA. One
example of an OSA service was developed, which
served as the main part of the case study. Based on
experiences during development of that service, the
benefits of OSA and the new market opportunities it
offers were evaluated.
UMTS is seen as the enabler of wireless multimedia
applications and portability of a personalized service
set across network and terminal boundaries, as defined
within the virtual home environment system concept.
On one hand, there are the classical centralized IN-
type service control architectures, which remain very
important for continuing support of legacy IN services.
On the other hand, there is the new decentralized OSA-
type service provisioning architecture that appears to
be very interesting for flexible deployment of future
innovative multimedia services. Because each of the
two scenarios has its merits in certain situations, both
types of interfaces will coexist and the solution will lie
in the selection of the type of interface most suitable to
provide a particular service.
We predict that future work will focus on the use of
mobile agents. Today's customary technologies, such
as HTTP or WAP, won't be neglected, since it is
anticipated that use of wide spread technologies for
user interfaces is a prerequisite for real-life use of the
proposed solution. The main line of work will deal
with moving the focus from single agents to multiple
cooperating agents. The final goal is a multi-agent
system for fully autonomous VHE provisioning where
personal agents represent their owners.
6. Acknowledgement
The authors want to thank the support, suggestions,
and insightful comments of this research project by
many anonymous people and committees.
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