Monitoring continuous location queries using mobile agents

Abstract

Nowadays the number of mobile device users is continuously increasing. However the available data services for those users are rare and usually provide an inefficient performance. More particularly, a growing interest is arising around location-based services but the processing of location-dependent queries is still a subject of research in the new mobile computing environment. Special difficulties arise when considering the need of keeping the answer to these queries up-to-date, due to the mobility of involved objects. In this paper we introduce a new approach for processing location-dependent queries that presents the following features: 1) it deals with scenarios where users issuing queries as well as objects involved in such queriescan change their location, 2) it dealswith continuous queries and so answers are updated with a certain frequency, 3) it provides a completely decentralised solution and 4) it optimises wireless communication costs by using mobile agents. We focus on the way in which data presented to the user must be refreshed in order to show an up-to-date answer but optimising communications effort. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.