Mobile Web and Location-Based Services

Abstract

The Web today, powered by Web server, application server technology, and Web services, is the lingua franca of the bulk of contents out on the Internet. As computing and communications options become ubiquitous, this Internet access capability is being embedded in billions of wireless devices such as PDAs, cellular phones, and computers embedded in vehicles. The Mobile Web is extending the Web through mobile information access, with the promise of greater information access opportunity, richer and device-spanning Web experiences, due to continuous availability and location awareness. In addition, advances in positioning technologies, mobile hardware, and the growing popularity and availability of mobile communications have made many devices location-aware. Location-based information management has become an important problem in mobile computing systems. Furthermore, the computational capabilities in mobile devices continue to rise, making mobile devices increasingly accessible. However, much research efforts to date have been devoted to location management in centralized location monitoring systems. Very few have studied the distributed approach to real-time location management. We argue that for mobile applications that need to manage a large and growing number of mobile objects, the centralized approaches do not scale well in terms of server load and network bandwidth, and are vulnerable to single point of failure. In this keynote, I will describe the distributed location service architecture, and discuss some important opportunities and challenges of mobile location based services (LBSs) in future computing environments. I will first review the research and development of LBSs in the past decade, focusing on system scalability, robustness, and performance measurements. Then I will discuss some important challenges for wide deployment of distributed location-based services in mission-critical applications and future computing environments. Not surprisingly, the mobile web and the location-aware computing will drive the merger of wireless and wired Internet world, creating a much larger industry than today’s predominantly wired Internet industry.