Mobiscope: A scalable spatial discovery service for mobile network resources

Abstract

Mobiscope is a discovery service where clients submit long-running queries to continually find sets of moving network resources within a specified area. As in moving object databases (MODBMSs), moving resources advertise their positions as functions over time. When Mobiscope receives a query, it runs the query statically against advertisements (ads) that are currently cached by Mobiscope, and then continuously over ads that Mobiscope receives subsequently. For scalability, Mobiscope distributes the workload to multiple nodes by spatial coordinates. Application-level routing protocols based on geography ensure that all queries find all matching resources on any node without significant processing overhead. Simulation results indicate that Mobiscope scales well, even under workloads that stress Mobiscope's distribution model. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.