[Tool] tools/collect/location/loclib (v. 2007-09-14)

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the initial version.

@MISC{tools-collect-location-loclib-2007-09-14,
  author = {Thomas King and Stephan Kopf and Thomas Butter and Hendrik Lemelson and Thomas Haenselmann and Wolfgang Effelsberg},
  title = {{CRAWDAD} tool tools/collect/location/loclib (v. 2007-09-14)}, 
  howpublished = {Downloaded from http://crawdad.cs.dartmouth.edu/tools/collect/location/loclib},
  month = sep,  
  year = 2007
}
					

Loclib is a research tool for 802.11-based positioning systems. Loclib is 
a connector between applications and sensor hardware. Its task is to collect 
data from the sensor hardware and pre-process it for further usage.

This tool is released under the GNU General Public License. 
Please respect our work and abide the license.

See "usage" for details.

See "usage" for details.

1. Overview

Loclib is a connector between applications and sensor hardware. Its task is 
to collect data from the sensor hardware and pre-process it for further usage. 

On the application side it offers two types of front-ends: The well-known 
Location API to access position estimates, and so-called handlers that provide 
access to sensor-specific data (e.g., signal strength values of neighboring access points). 
On the sensor hardware side, it communicates directly with hardware drivers 
to access sensor information that would otherwise be hidden. Loclib focuses 
not only on 802.11, it also contains a GPS part that is able to talk 
to NMEA-0183-enabled GPS devices as well as a digital compass for obtaining 
direction and inclination information.

2. Architecture

As already mentioned in the previous section, Loclib interconnects sensor hardware 
and applications by gathering sensor-specific data and converting it into location 
information if required. Loclib is organized in three layers:

- Sensor-specific data collection layer
- Data conversion layer
- Location application programming interface layer

The sensor-specific data collection layer gathers data from different sensor hardware. 
At the moment, Loclib is able to retrieve data from 802.11 wireless LAN network cards, 
NMEA-enabled GPS receivers, and digital compasses. To collect data, drivers can be 
accessed, or if it is feasible Loclib communicates directly with the sensor in question. 
For instance, digital compasses are directly queried, as well as NMEA-0183 devices. 
In case of 802.11 network cards, the signal strength of access points in communication 
range is retrieved from the driver. The data collected from the sensor-specific data 
collection layer is usually forwarded to the data conversion layer for further processing. 
However, the data can also be directly accessed by using so-called handlers. Handlers 
are pre-defined interfaces to allow applications such as Loctrace to access sensor-specific data.

The data conversion layer is responsible for converting data provided by the sensor-specific 
data collection layer into a position estimate that can be utilized by the Location API. 
To accomplish this, so far, GPS or 802.11-based positioning algorithms can be used. 
The data conversion layer is able to switch between 802.11-based positioning and 
GPS-based positioning if one of the sources fades out and the other is still operational. 
If both positioning services are available, GPS is preferred. Should both sources of 
position information be unable to deliver the required data an error code is returned 
instead of a valid position. 

The location application program interface layer implements the well-known and widely 
used Location API to deliver location estimates to applications.  This is a standardized 
way to hand over location information. Especially on mobile devices, this is a wide-spread 
approach to support location-based services.

3. Documentation & Tests

For software documentation purposes we mostly rely on Javadoc.
Additionally, we use JUnit tests and UML diagrams during our development process 
as documentation tools.

4. Location API

We have implemented the Location API as defined in JSR-179 to provide application 
developers a unified interface to location information. So far, our implementation 
is not completely compliant with the standard because we focused on the features 
we need. In the future, we will add missing parts.

1. NMEA-0183

A library compliant to the NMEA-0183 (Version 2.2) standard is part of Loclib. 
The NMEA library is specifically optimized for GPS receivers based on the SiRF 
II chipset. However, the library may work with other NMEA-0183 compliant devices 
as well.

Invoke Loclib with the following command to display the information provided 
by the GPS receiver:

java -cp loclib-0.7.5.jar:debug-disable-1.1.jar:hexdump-0.1.jar:libdbus-java-2.3.1.jar:unix-0.2.jar:j2meunit.jar:locutil1-0.5.1.jar org.pi4.loclib.nmea0183.test.SerialGpsTestToString

2. Wireless LAN

Our Wireless LAN implementation supports Active and Passive Scanning as well as 
Monitor-Sniffing. Monitor-Sniffing has been proposed by us and is discussed 
in the research paper "Wiretapping the Wireless Interface for 802.11-based 
Positioning Systems". To get Monitor-Sniffing to work, a Wireless LAN network 
card is required that supports monitor mode.

You can start a test program that actively scans for neighboring access points 
by invoking the following command:

java -Djava.library.path=./ -cp loclib-0.7.5.jar:debug-disable-1.1.jar:hexdump-0.1.jar:libdbus-java-2.3.1.jar:unix-0.2.jar:j2meunit.jar:locutil1-0.5.1.jar org.pi4.loclib.wirelesslan.test.ScanTest

Please adjust the java.library.path accordingly.
The test program works only under Linux or *BSD operation systems. It actively 
scans for access points using interface eth0 and prints detail information about 
the presence and signal strength quality of access points in communication range.

3. Bluetooth

A so-called proximity-based Bluetooth location system is part of Loclib. 
This kind of location systems have been proposed by many researchers and 
they work as follows: the position of a mobile device is derived from 
the access points in communication range by averaging their positions.

Our implementation requires the BlueZ Bluetooth stack and a Linux or *BSD operating system.

Replace the MAC addresses and coordinates stored in the bluetoothlocationdata.txt file 
with the values of the Bluetooth access points in your vicinity. 
Modify the loclib.properties, so that "provider=Bluetooth" is set. 
After that, invoke Loclib with the following command:

java -cp loclib-0.7.5.jar:debug-disable-1.1.jar:hexdump-0.1.jar:libdbus-java-2.3.1.jar:unix-0.2.jar:j2meunit.jar:locutil1-0.5.1.jar org.pi4.loclib.test.LocationProviderTest

4. Digital Compass

We have implemented the communication protocol for the F350-Compass-RD 
digital compass manufactured by Silicon Laboratories. The compass provides 
information about azimuth, current temperature and inclination of the compass 
on X- and Y-axis.

The declination angle must be set correctly. You can start a test program 
by invoking the following command:

java -cp loclib-0.7.5.jar:debug-disable-1.1.jar:hexdump-0.1.jar:libdbus-java-2.3.1.jar:unix-0.2.jar:j2meunit.jar:locutil1-0.5.1.jar org.pi4.loclib.f350compassfd.test.CompassTest

The test program continously requests and receives data from the compass 
and prints it to the screen.

As the compass package is not covered by the Location API, we encourage you 
to use the InputOutputHandler class as a front-ending if you want to use 
the compass package along with your own source code. The class that uses 
the InputOutputHandler is then supposed to implement the CompassListener 
interface in order to handle incoming messages. A detailed description is 
also available that discusses how to use the classes and interfaces.

5. Application: FDDD

FDDD (Fingerprint Database Distribution Demonstrator) is a demo application 
that illustrates algorithms for distributing fingerprints for 802.11-based 
positioning systems among mobile devices.

To invoke FDDD execute the following command:

java -cp loclib-0.7.5.jar:debug-disable-1.1.jar:hexdump-0.1.jar:libdbus-java-2.3.1.jar:unix-0.2.jar:j2meunit.jar:locutil1-0.5.1.jar -Djava.library.path=PATH_LOCLIB_JNI -Djava.security.policy=PATH_FDDD/rmi.policy -jar fddd-0.5.jar

The words in upper case are placeholders:

- PATH_LOCLIB_JNI defines the path to the Loclib jni directory
- PATH_FDDD defines the path where the FDDD code is stored

6. Application: SPBM

SPBM (Scalable Position-Based Multicast) is a multicast routing protocol 
for mobile ad-hoc networks. It uses the positions of the nodes in the network 
to forward data packets. Loclib can be used to provide the SPBM kernel module 
with coordinates derived from the current GPS position.

loclib-spbm requires four command line arguments:

Latitude of the origin of the SPBM coordinate system (in degrees)
Longitude of the origin of the SPBM coordinate system (in degrees)
Step width along the x axis of the SPBM coordinate system (in degrees)
Step width along the y axis of the SPBM coordinate system (in degrees)

For example, if you want to use SPBM in the city of Mannheim (Germany), 
you have to run loclib-spbm as follows:

java -jar loclib-spbm-0.1.jar 49.3 8.5 0.0001 0.0001

[Author] Thomas King

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[Author] Stephan Kopf

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[Author] Thomas Butter

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[Author] Hendrik Lemelson

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[Author] Thomas Haenselmann

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[Author] Wolfgang Effelsberg

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[Paper] king-tools

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802.11-based positioning systems are a hot topic in research. However, no 
standardized set of tools has been established to facilitate the research 
process. In this paper, we contribute our research tools to the community. The 
benefit for the community is considerable: (1) Standardized tools reduce the 
amount of work each researcher has to spend to build software to collect signal 
strength samples and process this data. (2) The confidence in the correctness 
of the tools increases because everybody is encouraged to submit bugfixes. (3) 
A unified evaluation process makes results mutually comparable. (4) We hope 
other researchers contribute to our tools.