Charged Location Aware Services

Abstract

Location aware services have been envisioned as the killer application for the wireless Internet. But they did not gain sufficient attention. We are convinced that one of the major pitfalls is that there is up to now no way to charge for this kind of services. In this paper we present an architecture which provides the basic mechanisms needed to realize charged location based services. The three major components are: a location aware middleware platform, an information server and a micro payment system. We provide performance data that clearly indicates that such a system can be deployed without exhausting the resources of mobile devices or infrastructure servers.