The architectures of systems for implementation of location aware services

This paper aims to introduce the reader to a future with location based tasks used on a daily basis. Instead of writing your tasks on a piece of paper and sticking them on the refrigerator, you would rather link your shopping list on your smart phone with the grocery, which is on your way home from the office. At the beginning there is a short introduction to techniques used to acquire location. The introduced methods are of two sorts, the first being those that use available sensors on the device to track the location of the user, the second utilizing the mobile carrier’s infrastructure to obtain the location data. After that, a few select location based services are presented, as to give the reader a sense of what added value the location information can give to the user. Introduced in the second half of the paper are some possible solutions and implementations of a system for location based to-do’s, sorted by complexity. Presented solutions range from a simple mobile application that only uses local storage to save data and available location sensors on the device, to a full fledged system implemented by a mobile network carrier, which uses cell towers for positioning and short message service for alerting the users of any important tasks in their vicinity. There is also a short introduction to the on-going privacy issue surrounding location based services