DeviceForge.com has published a whitepaper introducing an open source toolkit that lets mobile devices determine their locations with the aid of freely accessible, nearby radio sources, such as fixed Bluetooth devices, 802.11 access points, and GSM cell towers. Basically, the device reads the IDs of these local “radio beacons” (each of which has a unique or semi-unique ID), looks up their… positions in a locally-cached database, and performs a computation akin to triangulation. Intel created Place Lab in an effort to satisfy the emerging requirement for location-awareness within mobile devices such as smartphones, PDAs, and laptops, or even moving vehicles. According to the whitepaper, over four million of the required radio beacons have already been mapped.

Read the full whitepaper, and learn how to obtain and use the toolkit, here:

 
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