Evaluation of a Location Management System for Wireless Communicating Mobile Computers

Abstract

Mobile hosts can acquire location-dependent information at any place and be connected to a network from anywhere with wireless communication devices such as cellular phones, wireless LAN, etc. In such an environment we aim to construct a system software on which mobile hosts can share the location-dependent information with other hosts. It is, however, difficult for users who request location-dependent information to identify mobile hosts providing the information, since the system presents no mechanism to specify hosts by geographic location. In this paper we propose a location management system that manages locations of mobile hosts and enables users to specify location-dependent informations by their geographic locations. Since the location management system is employed for mobile computing, the system has the mechanism to reduce the overhead of location management on wireless communication. Moreover, we implement a part of this system and show that this system is suitable for mobile environment through the experiment.