Remote service discovery and binding architecture for soft real-time QoS in indoor location-based service

Indoor location-based service (LBS) is generally distinguished from web services that have no physical location and user context. In particular, various resources have dynamic and frequent mobility in indoor environments. In addition, an indoor LBS includes numerous service lookups being requested concurrently and frequently from several locations, even through a network infrastructure requiring high scalability in indoor environments. The traditional centralized LBS approach needs to maintain a geographical map of the entire building or complex in its central server, which can cause low scalability and traffic congestion. This paper presents a self-organizing and fully distributed indoor LBS platform with regional cooperation among devices. A service lookup algorithm based on the proposed distributed architecture searches for the shortest physical path to the nearest service resource. A continuous service binding mechanism guarantees a probabilistic real-time QoS regardless of dynamic and frequent mobility in a soft real-time system such as an indoor LBS. Performance evaluation of the proposed algorithm and platform is compared to the traditional centralized architecture in the experimental evaluation of scalability and real test bed environments.