Integration of Indoor Positioning into a Global Location Platform

The availability of positioning information for short range wireless networks, especially in in-door environments, can enable a broad variety of location based mobile services. In this paper, we discuss current indoor positioning systems based on Wireless LAN and incurred performance issues resulting on implementation and application requirements. Our approach extends conventional indoor positioning systems by introducing a homogeneous interface between outdoor-based (e.g. cellular networks, GPS Systems) and indoor-based positioning systems (e.g. WLAN or Bluetooth Networks). Furthermore, we discuss several positioning methods and show how geodesic methods can improve positioning methods, especially during positioning system initialization.