A robust management platform for multi-sensor location data interpretation

Location information is the key context information for multiple applications and services and it is also used to effectively filter additional context information. An increasing demand for always available context information is imposed by multiple new applications like cooperative and cognitive communications and cooperative positioning applications. In order to reliably provide location information, multi-sensor environments comprising of different location sensors, location and situation dependent data fusion rules and even other context sensors will be used. A broad market introduction hence requires a support for multi-sensor and multi-vendor plug and play location sensors. A heterogeneous location information management system, as presented in this paper, disposing of open interfaces, allows any kind of location sensor to be exploited and, at the same time, to rate and rank sensors according to their performance in order to provide data about the reliability of the provided location information.