johnh: research teaching PAPERS software other contact about

Location-Aware Scheduling With Minimal Infrastructure

John Heidemann and Dhaval Shah
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

Mobile computers often benefit from software which adapts to their location. For example, a computer might be backed up when at the office, or the default printer might always be a nearby one. In many existing systems, location-triggered actions are only possible for specific applications or with special infrastructure. This paper describes lcron, a system which supports user-configurable actions triggered on change in location or other events common to mobile computers. Key features of lcron are its use of existing clues for location information and mapping low-level location information into user-sensible terms. Lcron uses a number of existing sources of location such as network connection and base station ID, allowing it to work without special hardware or GPS receivers. We map sources of low-level information such as IP address and latitude/longitude into user-meaningful logical locations. We describe the design, implementation and our experiences with this system.

Availability

This paper is available in several formats: abstract web page with pointers and cites, gzip'ed postscript, PDF, paper copies can be obtained by mail to the authors. Copyright terms for this paper appear below.

Reference

Heidemann00b: John Heidemann and Dhaval Shah. Location-Aware Scheduling With Minimal Infrastructure. In USENIX Conference Proceedings, pp. 131-138. San Diego, CA, USC/Information Sciences Institute, USENIX. June, 2000. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann00b.html>.

@inproceedings{Heidemann00b,
	author = "John Heidemann and Dhaval Shah",
	title = "Location-Aware Scheduling With Minimal Infrastructure",
	booktitle = " {USENIX} Conference Proceedings",
	year = "2000",
	publisher = "{USENIX}",
	address = "San Diego, CA",
	month = "June",
	pages = "131--138",
	keywords = "cron, xcron, lcron, location-awareness,
                         context-awareness, mobile computing",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann00b.html",
	psurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann00b.ps.gz",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Heidemann00b.pdf",
	organization = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
}

Copyright

This paper is copyright © 2000 by its authors. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that new copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Abstracting with credit is permitted.

To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission of the authors.