In communication networks, the location of a user or user device is often needed to perform a function. For instance, alerts or other types of information may need to be delivered to a user. Location-aware devices facilitate these applications by being able to provide location-related information to applications. On the other hand, location-unaware devices are not provided with this functionality.
In previous communication networks, location information gathering, storage, and usage were network, device, or application specific. Specifically, after the information had been gathered, the information was usually stored in a non-uniform format depending upon the device or network type. Furthermore, applications used within one type of network were not portable to another type of network. Consequently, location information gathered in one network, from one type of device, or from disparate applications was not useable in another network, at a different type of device, or among different applications.
In addition, devices operating in previous systems relied upon the networks to provide location information. However, previous networks were not configured to provide location information because of technical or configuration management issues. For example, in WLAN networks, WLAN Access Points were often too high in number to manually configure and maintain the location of each access point. Similarly, for sensor networks, the sensors had very little processing power and memory and were also high in numbers.
In one example of these problems, a cellular network could determine and store the location of a multi-mode handset of a user. Subsequently, the user (with the multi mode handset) might move from the cellular network to a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). However, in previous systems, the user location information ceased to remain available or accurate when the handset switched from the cellular network to the WLAN. Even if the information was of a different type or were to remain available, the location information from the cellular network was stored in a different format than that required by devices operating in the WLAN. Consequently, location based service (LBS) applications that required accurate and available location data became inoperative or produced erroneous results. In addition, LBS applications operating in the cellular network could not operate in the WLAN.
Some previous systems attempted to resolve the above-mentioned problems by allowing for the manual modification of device configurations by a user. In such systems, a user would manually reconfigure their equipment to operate within a particular network, device, or application and change this configuration as needed. However, this manual reconfiguration process was expensive, time-consuming, and prone to user errors. Even after manual reconfiguration, location information remained in one domain (e.g., a particular network) and was not transportable across domains. Furthermore, no domain-independent application query mechanism existed that was standardized across all network types to determine a location of the user.
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