Patent Application
20070217374
Wireless networks have grown increasingly in importance and have varying uses. In addition to communications, it is useful to provide position information in wireless networks. Distinct wireless networks may utilize distinct position location determination techniques, each of which may be advantageous and more effective in various usage scenarios.
Thus, a strong need exists for techniques to collaborate wireless terminal position locations determined from various wireless networks which use various position determination techniques.
The subject matter regarded as the invention is particularly pointed out and distinctly claimed in the concluding portion of the specification. The invention, however, both as to organization and method of operation, together with objects, features, and advantages thereof, may best be understood by reference to the following detailed description when read with the accompanying drawings in which:
It will be appreciated that for simplicity and clarity of illustration, elements illustrated in the figures have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements are exaggerated relative to other elements for clarity. Further, where considered appropriate, reference numerals have been repeated among the figures to indicate corresponding or analogous elements.
In the following detailed description, numerous specific details are set forth in order to provide a thorough understanding of the invention. However, it will be understood by those skilled in the art that the present invention may be practiced without these specific details. In other instances, well-known methods, procedures, components and circuits have not been described in detail so as not to obscure the present invention.
An algorithm, technique or process is here, and generally, considered to be a self-consistent sequence of acts or operations leading to a desired result. These include physical manipulations of physical quantities. Usually, though not necessarily, these quantities take the form of electrical or magnetic signals capable of being stored, transferred, combined, compared, and otherwise manipulated. It has proven convenient at times, principally for reasons of common usage, to refer to these signals as bits, values, elements, symbols, characters, terms, numbers or the like. It should be understood, however, that all of these and similar terms are to be associated with the appropriate physical quantities and are merely convenient labels applied to these quantities.
Embodiments of the present invention may include apparatuses for performing the operations herein. An apparatus may be specially constructed for the desired purposes, or it may comprise a general purpose computing device selectively activated or reconfigured by a program stored in the device. Such a program may be stored on a storage medium, such as, but not limited to, any type of disk including floppy disks, optical disks, compact disc read only memories (CD-ROMs), magnetic-optical disks, read-only memories (ROMs), random access memories (RAMs), electrically programmable read-only memories (EPROMs), electrically erasable and programmable read only memories (EEPROMs), magnetic or optical cards, or any other type of media suitable for storing electronic instructions, and capable of being coupled to a system bus for a computing device.
The processes and displays presented herein are not inherently related to any particular computing device or other apparatus. Various general purpose systems may be used with programs in accordance with the teachings herein, or it may prove convenient to construct a more specialized apparatus to perform the desired method. The desired structure for a variety of these systems will appear from the description below. In addition, embodiments of the present invention are not described with reference to any particular programming language. It will be appreciated that a variety of programming languages may be used to implement the teachings of the invention as described herein. In addition, it should be understood that operations, capabilities, and features described herein may be implemented with any combination of hardware (discrete or integrated circuits) and software.
as in a cause and effect relationship).
It should be understood that embodiments of the present invention may be used in a variety of applications. Although the present invention is not limited in this respect, the devices disclosed herein may be used in many apparatuses such as in the transmitters and receivers of a radio system. Radio systems intended to be included within the scope of the present invention include, by way of example only, cellular radiotelephone communication systems, satellite communication systems, two-way radio communication systems, one-way pagers, two-way pagers, personal communication systems (PCS), personal digital assistants (PDA's), wireless local area networks (WLAN), personal area networks (PAN, and the like), wireless wide are networks (WWAN), wireless metropolitan area networks (WMAN) and Mesh networks.
Use of the terms “coupled” and “connected”, along with their derivatives, may be used. It should be understood that these terms are not intended as synonyms for each other. Rather, in particular embodiments, “connected” may be used to indicate that two or more elements are in direct physical or electrical contact with each other. “Coupled” my be used to indicated that two or more elements are in either direct or indirect (with other intervening elements between them) physical or electrical contact with each other, and/or that the two or more elements co-operate or interact with each other (e.g. as in a cause and effect relationship).
An embodiment of the present invention provides wireless metropolitan area network (WMAN) such as, but not limited to, cellular or WiMAX, position location of combination WMAN-WLAN wireless terminals, even in cases where GPS does not exist or does not operate properly. This may be the case when operating indoors or when multiple base-stations are not around for spotting the device or simply due to poor accuracy of the WMAN position location. In an embodiment of the present invention, higher layer protocols such as mobile IP etc. are not required for locating the device through a wireless local area network (WLAN) and in addition, WLAN nodes, such as a wireless terminal as referred to herein, does not have to be associated or need to transmit.
Wireless local area network (WLAN) access points (APs) may be capable of storing and broadcasting their location based on GPS or manual settings or setting through networks, to name a few. In an embodiment of the present invention, a wireless metropolitan area network (WMAN), such as, but not limited to cellular or WiMAX, may locate a wireless terminal of the present invention based on the information the wireless terminal obtains from a WLAN AP which may be derived from one or more APs that store their location information; although the present invention is not limited in this respect.
In an embodiment of the present invention, one method for the wireless terminal to estimate its position would be to store the coordinates of the AP it is associated to or in another embodiment of the present invention, the AP received with the highest RSSI.
If more than one AP is received, a more complicated but accurate scheme may be to use algorithms that try to better estimate the coordinates of the mobile WLAN terminal, based on information from these multiple WLAN AP's (these algorithms are well known to those or ordinary skill in the art for implementation into an embodiment the present invention). In an embodiment of the present invention, the WLAN AP may broadcast its position using a beacon packet. In such case, the wireless terminal does not have to be associated to the WLAN AP in order to properly receive the position of the AP. An embodiment of the present invention provides a single radio frequency (RF) chain with a dual WMAN-WLAN mode, wherein during WLAN operation, the location may be stored and during WMAN operation the location may be reported.
The position location method proposed in an embodiment herein may be used in cases where GPS does not function properly due to indoor usage or multiple base-stations are not around to spot the wireless terminal or simply due to insufficient accuracy of the WMAN position location. An embodiment of the present invention may provide that locating a wireless terminal through the WLAN network may also possible but may require a more complicated bi-directional protocol such as mobile IP; and the wireless terminal must transmit and this may not be possible if the wireless terminal is not associated as proposed in an embodiment of the present invention.
Turning now to the figures,
Turning now to
Yet another embodiment of the present invention provides a machine-accessible medium that provides instructions, which when accessed, cause a machine to perform operations comprising, controlling the operations of a wireless terminal in a wireless local area network (WLAN) and a wireless metropolitan area network (WMAN) and collaborating terminal position information in the WMAN and terminal position information in the WLAN to determine the position of the wireless terminal. The machine-accessible medium of an embodiment of the present invention may further comprise the instructions causing the machine to perform operations further comprising determining the wireless terminal position information in the WLAN by the wireless terminal storing the coordinates of an access point (A) in the WLAN associated with the wireless terminal and may also further comprise the instructions causing the machine to perform operations further comprising determining the wireless terminal position information in the WLAN by the wireless terminal determining an access point (AP) in the WLAN with the highest received signal strength indication (RSSI).
While certain features of the invention have been illustrated and described herein, many modifications, substitutions, changes, and equivalents will now occur to those skilled in the art. It is, therefore, to be understood that the appended claims are intended to cover all such modifications and changes as fall within the true spirit of the invention.
