Location-based services: architecture and progress

With the advances in wireless communication technologies and smart mobile devices, Location-based Services (LBS), which provide personalized services based on users' location information, have been widely applied in military, transportation, logistics etc. Currently, mainstream positioning techniques are mainly divided into three categories, including satellite-based positioning, network infrastructure-based positioning and presence sensing positioning. With the help of effective spatio-temporal indexes, LBS are capable of processing the service requests efficiently. LBS usually employ different location privacy preservation methods to protect the user privacy. Recently, because of the complexity of applications, the cooperation of multiple positioning techniques and the huge data volume, new challenges emerge. Indoor LBS, management of uncertain data, novel location privacy protection method, LBS on cloud infrastructure and social LBS are becoming critical issues. This paper introduces the architecture of an LBS system and the key techniques of its components. Second, After reviewing the main progresses in recent years, we discuss the future work briefly.