Int’l Conf.
on Computer & Communication TechnologyŇ,&&&7¶Ň
Model Checking Message Exchange in Location Based Services
Ashwini Moily, Guru Prasanna, Keerthi S. Shetty and Sanjay Singh
Department of Information and Communication Technology,
Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal, India.
Abstract - Over the past couple of years, the extent of the
services provided on the mobile devices has increased rapidly.
A special class of service among them is the Location Based
Service which depends on the geographical position of the user.
The aim of this paper is to model check the messages
exchanged between the user and the service provider. Using a
symbolic model checker tool called NuSMV, the message
exchange in the system has been modelled and it is observed
that the system takes care of all the constraints by satisfying all
the specifications.
Index Terms—Symbolic Model verifier, NuSMV, Location Based
Services, Model Checker.
I. INTRODUCTION
There has been a substantial rise in the use of mobile
devices over the past couple of years. The range of services
provided to these users has also seen a lot of advancement,
Location Based Services (LBS) being one of them. The
service provider uses the geographical position of the user to
provide these services. A symbolic model checker is used to
model the messages exchanged between the user and the
service provider. It searches the entire possible state space
and checks for the correctness of the various specifications.
A lot of development in the field of mobile computing
devices can be seen during the recent years. With the rapid
improvement in technology of these mobile computing
devices, LBS have been gaining a lot of attention over the
years. But any form of work in the field of formalizing these
LBS has been minimal.
Hoareau and Satoh [1] have discussed a query processing
Framework for location based services in their works. They
use context aware services to detect the locations of people,
physical objects and services. They can be modeled in a
symbolic manner, independent of any location sensing
technology [1].The idea behind their query based framework
is to apply and adapt the principles of model checking to
query the contextual data structures. They use a query based
language to ensure the correctness of their framework [2].
They try to make sure that the results of any query (i) do not
miss any information that satisfy its necessary and sufficient
conditions and (ii) do not contain any information that does
not satisfy the conditions. They have proposed a layered
system architecture using Objective [2]. This framework
uses context aware services that can be used in Radio
Frequency Identification (RFID) based systems or location
aware systems. But this framework does not use any method
of communication between the client and server. All the
communication among different modules in the system is
done using the query processing framework.
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978-1-4244-9034-/10/$26.00©2010 IEEE
Zhang et. al. [3] uses RFID to provide LBS to a context
aware system. They use a hierarchical structure that
organizes positions based on Tracking Zone of Interest
(TZOI). They use RFID tags to locate the user and provide
the required service. This project requires security and
privacy protection to be taken care of which could prove to
be an added shortcoming to the development of the project.
In this paper, we have developed a method to formalize
the messages exchanged between the service provider and
the user in the LBS environment using a symbolic model
checking approach. We have used a tool called New
Symbolic Model Verifier (NuSMV) [4].
The remaining paper is organized as follows. Section II
discusses the theoretical background of LBS, various
technologies used and the message exchange that occurs in
the system. Section III describes the implementation along
with pseudo code for the same. Section IV discusses about
the various properties of the system. Finally, a conclusion
has been drawn in section V.
II. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
A. Location Based Services
Location based service uses the geographical position of a
user to provide services such as health, work, entertainment
services etc. The mobile service providers are the entities
that provide these services to the user.
A distinct characteristic of LBS is its capability to
provide service not just based on time and location, but also
based on the user requirement at a particular location. The
LBS system should be aware of the user needs and capable
of mapping it to the location at which the service is required.
The complexity of this system increases when the accuracy
of the position and the dependency relationships between
the locations need to be considered [3].
There are various devices that can be used to detect the
location of the user in the system. Some of the examples are
Global positioning system (GPS), RFID etc.
1) GPS based systems: The Global Positioning System is a
navigation system that consists of 28 high-altitude satellites
with highly accurate atomic clocks. These satellites are used
to find the precise geographical position of a user. The GPS
services are usually freely available [5].
The GPS receiver uses a triangulation method of the
satellites to pinpoint the location of a user. It can be used to
find the exact location to an order of a few meters. Error
larger than a few meters is intolerable in these systems. GPS
systems have a response time of the order of a few
milliseconds making it a highly efficient system for LBS.
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Int’l Conf. on Computer & Communication TechnologyŇ,&&&7¶Ň
2) RFID systems: It is one of the technologies that has
gained a lot of importance in the recent times. The distinct
characteristics that separate it from other context aware
technologies are contact-less, multi-object recognition, non-
line of-sight, and long distance, large store of memory,
programmability and penetrability [3]. The main advantage
of RFID is its ability to map a physical object to a virtual
object in its RFID network. This is achieved by assigning a
physical tag to each physical object.
The entire area under the RFID system is divided into
zones. These zones are then mapped into space of
information tags. This mapping makes it easier to determine
the accurate locations of the physical objects.
Currently, there is no system that is capable of giving the
exact location information. GPS works accurately only on
outdoors. It fails to provide satisfactory results when there is
some kind of obstruction. Whereas on the other hand, RFID
tags can be used on a request/response model to store unique
RFID tags or some other form of identifier in their memory,
and hence can be used to track mobile objects irrespective of
their location.
B. Message exchange in LBS
When a user enters into the coverage area of a service
provider, various messages are exchanged. It could be the
service provider sending a list of services to the client, or the
user selecting among the list of services, or the messages
could also include the service provider performing the
authentication and authorization based on the information
received from the mobile device. These messages
exchanged form the backbone of the LBS system.
C. NuSMV
NuSMV is a software tool for the formal verification of
finite state systems. NuSMV allows us to check finite state
systems against specifications in the linear temporal logic
and Computational Tree Logic (CTL) [6]. The input
language of NuSMV is designed to allow the description of
finite state systems that range from completely synchronous
to completely asynchronous [4]. It provides a modular
hierarchical description and reusable component. NuSMV is
mostly used for describing the transitions of a finite Kripke
Structure.
NuSMV works only with finite data types such as
Boolean, scalar and fixed array. The main features of
NuSMV are its functionalities, architecture and quality of
implementation. NuSMV allows analysis of specification
expressed in CTL and Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) using
Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) and SAT-based checking
[6].
We are using NuSMV for modeling the messages
exchanged in a LBS environment. We model the different
states the LBS service provider goes through while
providing the services to the registered users.
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III. IMPLEMENTATION
Our main goal is to perform symbolic model checking for
LBS services. We have modularized the system into
different modules of the system such as a module that
provides authorization, a module where the LBS service
provider lists the available services for registered users etc.
Fig. 1. Location Based Services
The working of the LBS system is as shown in Fig. 1. Each
hexagonal structure in the figure corresponds to a location in
the LBS. The location is capable of providing multiple
services. A registered user is free to move from one location
to the other. Once the user enters any location, he receives
the service available in that location if he has registered for
it.
The service provider performs authentication when a user
registers for its services. If the user is authenticated, the
service provider provides the list of services to the user.
This list contains all the services the user is registered to and
available in that location. The user selects a service among
the services in this list. The service provider provides the
requested service to the user as long as the user is in that
location. This can be explained better with the help of a
pseudo code given in Algorithm 1.
The Algorithm 1 depicts the overall working of the LBS
system. When any registered user enters a location, the
authentication is verified based on the user id and the phone
number. The service provider identifies the location and the
services present in that location. If the user is authenticated
the list of services is sent to the user after verifying the
authenticity of the user. Based on this list, the user chooses
from the service provided by the service provider. This can
be understood better with a help of Kripke structure as
shown in Fig. 2.
This model explains that a user can move from one
location to any other location. When a user is present in one
location say A, he will be able to receive all the services that
he has subscribed for in that location. The user can avail the
services
Int’l Conf. on Computer & Communication TechnologyŇ,&&&7¶Ň
Algorithm 1 LocationBasedService ()
1: Register User (userid, phoneno)
2: for every registered user do
3: when user enters any of the location
4: Identify Location ()
5: Identify services in Location (location)
6: if user is authenticated then
7: for every user do
8: Provide List of Services (services)
9: end for
10: for every service in the list sent by service provider do
11: user selects the service
12: end for
13: for every service selected by user do
14: service provider provides the service
15: end for
16: end if
17: end for
Fig. 2. Kripke structure for the entire LBS system
in a location as long as he is present in that location. The
service is no longer available to him if he changes the
location.
Algorithm 2 Identify Location ()
1: Identify the location the user is currently present using
either RFID or GPS.
2: Identify the number of users present in the location for
whom the services have to be provided.
3: return Location co-ordinates.
In Algorithm 2, the location of the user is identified using
either RFID or GPS. Once the location has been identified,
the number of users has to be computed. Once this
computation is done, the location co-ordinates of the
particular user are sent to the service provider.
In Algorithm 3, the location co-ordinates returned by
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Algorithm 3 Identify Services (location)
1: Identify the different services that are available in the
particular location.
2: Identify the type of services to be provided to a specific
user.
3: return Location co-ordinates.
Algorithm 4 Provide List of Services (services)
1: if user is authorized for the service then
2: add it to the list of available services.
3: end if
4: return List of Services
Algorithm 2 is used as a parameter to identify all the
services available in that location.
In Algorithm 4, for the given list of services available in
that location, the service provider checks whether the user is
authorized to use the service or not. For all the services that
the user is authorized, a list is created and sent to the user.
In this model, there are many services that are being
provided in a location. Based on the list of services available
at that location, and the user interest, the services are sent to
the users. Users may select any type of service they would
like to have. Once the choice is send to the service provider,
the service provider would provide with the details of the
particular service. In the model given a user can select the
different services such as Events, Food, and Music etc. The
user can change the request to any other service if they wish
to do so. Once the user moves out of the location the service
will not be available to them. In Fig. 3, location X is the
location outside the area of coverage of the service provider.
Once the user goes to that location, the service is no longer
available. The state NS denotes that no service is available
in that location.
The various CTL specifications for the LBS system can be
given by:
x AG(user available)!AG(service available)
This says that if in any location a user is present, then the
services are always provided to him if he is an authenticated
user. This specification is specified in Fig.2.
x AG(user request(Start))!AF(Event VFood VMusic)
This says that whenever a user requests for a service, the
user always gets either of the services, food, event or music.
This specification is specified in Fig. 3.
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
Table I shows the various constraints placed on the system
and results of the corresponding specifications.
1) The first specification in the table depicts that if there is
any request to a service at any location, the LBS system has
to provide the service if the user is registered to it.
Int’l Conf. on Computer & Communication TechnologyŇ,&&&7¶Ň
Fig. 3. Kripke structure for a single location
Sl.No. Case Specification
1 Location[1]=1 & Service[1][1]=1 True
2 Location[2]=1 & Service[1][2]=0 False
3 Location[3]=0 & Service[1][3]=1 False
4 Location[2]=0 & Service[1][2]=0 True
5 PersLoc[2]=1 & PersLoc[2]=2 False
6 Location[1]=1 & Location[1] False
TABLE I
SPECIFICATIONS OF THE LBS SYSTEM
2) The second specification in the table shows the
specification as false because the user has requested for a
service but the service has not been provided.
3) The third specification says that the service has been
provided even though the user has not asked for the specific
service. The specification is shown false since that is not
possible in a LBS system. A service is provided to a user
only when there is a request for the service.
4) The fourth specification in the table says that the service
is not provided to the user since it is not requested. The
specification is returned true as the LBS system does not
provide a service unless it is asked for.
5) The fifth specification says that a particular user cannot
be in two locations at any point of time. False is returned
when the user is at two different locations and a counter
example will be generated.
6) The sixth specification is false as it says that a user has
requested for two different services in the same location.
This is not allowed in the LBS system as a user is allowed to
use only one service at any given point of time.
V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
In this paper, we have used symbolic model checking
approach for message exchange in the LBS systems. The
tool NuSMV helps us to verify the constraints placed on the
system by exploring the entire state space of the system. It
provides a counter example along with the trace path to
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point to the location of error, if the system does not meet
any of the constraints. The various messages exchanged
between the service provider and the user in LBS
environment is modeled using NuSMV efficiently. It is
observed that all the constraints are met by the system
developed. We have assumed the nature of the information
in the LBS system to be static and modeled it accordingly.
There is a large scope for development that can be done in
this area.
1) The security issues need to be considered and taken care
of. We have used a very crude approach to perform
authentication and authorization that has room for
enhancement.
2) The system needs to be scaled for a large number of users
and its efficiency can be verified.
3) The dynamic nature of the LBS locations needs to be
taken into account and a better method to provide the
services could be proposed.
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