Ph.D Thesis description

Brief description

Nowadays, pedestrian navigation services are gaining a high interest in guiding the user at any place. Outdoor, the GPS remains currently the navigation standard. Whereas indoor, different positioning technologies such as the WiFi and the Bluetooth are employed in the development of such systems. However, very few publications can be found in the literature that address the issue of the continuity of the navigation service. The aim of this thesis is to develop an ubiquitous pedestrian navigation prototype that continuously and seamlessly calculates the mobile user position, anytime and anywhere, based on user preferences.

Detailed description

Over the ten past years, there has been a rising attention for personal navigation systems, given the significant interest of these applications in guiding and tracking a mobile user (MU) everywhere, in particular, in unfamiliar environments. The development of such systems reveals multiple challenges in several areas and requires the integration of different topics, especially, positioning. In an open space, the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) commonly known by the GPS standard, persists as the outdoor reference system for navigation. On the other hand, indoor pedestrian navigation has widely researched using different positioning technologies such as the WiFi and the RFID. However, very few publications can be found in the literature that address the issue of the continuity of the navigation service that should be, anytime and any- where, particularly when the user is moving from indoor to outdoor environments and vice versa.

In this thesis we aim to develop an ubiquitous pedestrian navigation prototype that continuously and seamlessly calculates the MU position anytime, everywhere using different positioning technologies (e.g., WiFi, Bluetooth and RFID). With the technological progress in the field of telecommunication, the MU can be connected to a number of positioning technologies at the same time. Thus, the prototype has to start by inferring the need of triggering a handoff process and then to select the appropriate one to use in the navigation process. The selection procedure considers a number of parameters (e.g, the signal noise ratio, MU's battery level and user preferences) and should be as fast as possible, without interruption of the service and transparent to the end user.