Efficiently Managing Location Information with Privacy Requirements in Wi-Fi Networks: a Middleware Approach

The growing availability of wireless portable devices is leveraging the diffusion of Location Based Services (LBSs) that provide service con-tents depending on the current position of clients, servers, and involved distributed resources. When a wide public of final users will use LBSs, two primary issues will emerge as crucial: how to guarantee the proper level of user privacy given the need to disclose, to some extent, client location information; how to effectively manage the exchange of positioning information (and of its variations) notwithstanding the high heterogeneity of connectivity technologies and device hardware/software capabilities. The paper pre-sents the privacy-related extension of our proxy-based mobile agent middleware to support per-sonalized service provisioning to Wi-Fi portable devices. In particular, our middleware prototype adopts a two-level proxy-based architecture to provide LBSs with middleware-mediated effective access to location data, which are exposed at the proper level of granularity depending on privacy/efficiency requirements dynamically ne-gotiated between clients and LBSs.