Reliable Geofencing: Assisted Configuration of Proactive Location-based Services

摘要

Today, proactive location-based services (LBS) are gaining momentum as mobile devices became able to track the users' position in the background without notable battery drain. They are used in several application areas like location-based marketing or gaming to deliver notifications, e.g. coupons, proactively to the user once a defined geographical area, also known as geofence, is entered. Owning to various reasons like the limited preciseness of positioning techniques for outdoor environments or the strict energy constraints of today's mobile devices, proactive LBS are still facing reliability issues. Either the user is burdened with non-relevant notifications in case the proactive LBS wrongly assumed the user to be located within a geofence, or notifications are not received at all although the user visited the geofence. This paper investigates how the day-by-day configuration of proactive LBS with geofences may influence the reliability of the service as a whole. Based on the findings, it introduces a web service which quantifies how reliable a proactive LBS will most probably be with respect to a given geofence in order to enable even non-experts to properly set up a proactive LBS with appropriate geofences.